JOCM

9,3 Filmic representations for

organizational analysis: the
characterization of a
44
transplant organization in the
film Rising Sun
Joel Foreman and Tojo Joseph Thatchenkery
Department of English and Program on Social and Organizational
Learning, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

Journal of Organizational Change
Management, Vol. 9 No. 3, 1996,
pp. 44-61. © MCB University Press,
0953-4814
Introduction
Clifford Geertz’s (1983) pronouncement on the refiguration of social thought is
both an instance of and a guide to that class of hybrid we call post-modern. One
such phenomenon – the global intertextuality which manifests itself in the
transplanting of Japanese organizations in American soil – is the subject of this
essay. Both the refiguration of social thought and the transplant organization
are, in Geertz’s terms, blurred genres: the products of transgressed and
overlapping boundaries. The former is the result of the migration of semiotic
modes of analysis into the social sciences and of recent developments in the
organization sciences (see, as examples, Fiol, 1989, 1991; Stuart and Fuller,
1991; Wattel, 1995); the latter results from the coincidence of Japanese and
American styles of organizational behaviour. One specific involution in this
relationship is this essay, which is itself the genetic result of at least three pairs
of cross-fertilization. First, we use semiotic tools of analysis (developed
principally by humanities scholars) to conduct an examination of a corporate
organization (an endeavour which is typically the domain of social science).
Second, the subject of our discussion is the transplant organization, itself the
inmixing of two different cultures. Third, we use a film, Rising Sun, as the major
example in our discussion and thus splice together the genres of the film
analysis and the organizational study.
What, we ask, is the role of narrative fiction, especially films, in the study of
organizations? Are they legitimate sources for “data” to interpret the various
facets of organizational life? How are they different from the so-called
“rigorous” methods of organizational analysis? In this essay, we argue that
filmic representations provide a unique approach to understanding
organizations. However, this contention rests against an overwhelming belief
that what organizational scientists and film writers do are worlds apart.
Organizational scientists observe, report and analyse the organizational reality
as it exists “out there”, whereas film writers invent reality or “make things up”.
This modernist notion that there is an objective world out there waiting to be Filmic
discovered and reported accurately by the scientific observer is in direct representations
opposition to the post-modernist view that organizational reality is socially
constructed (Gergen, 1985, 1994) and mediated by many language games
(Astley and Zammuto, 1992; Mauws and Phillips, 1995; Thatchenkery, 1992)
that inhabit the field of organization science and practice. For example, as
Phillips (1995) points out, social scientists often do what writers do: they create 45
rather than discover.
Similarly, fictive writers do something that social scientists do, “they test
ideas against evidence, they generalize, they pose testable questions about the
social world, and they try to remain faithful to details of external experience”
(Phillips, 1995, p. 627). In addition, according to Phillips (1995), the two
communities produce texts whose status is often ambiguous. Many stories look
like attempts to test some assumptions or, loosely speaking, hypotheses (such
as in George Orwell’s Animal Farm) while accounts of many social scientists
look like the products of narrative fiction (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) such as in
ethnographic case studies (Rosen, 1991; Van Maanen, 1988). As Phillips (1995)
points out, some works such as Carlos Castaneda’s The Teaching of Don Juan
are seen as both scientific and fictitious.
Thus, the conventional belief that social science and narrative fiction are
mutually exclusive is a doubtful proposition (Denzin, 1991). Good narrative
fictions provide us with detailed and plausible life-worlds that are “complex,
ambiguous, unique, and subject to the situational logic, interpretation,
resistance, and invention that characterize real organizations” (Phillips, 1995, p.
634). As such, stories are a valuable resource in our quest to understand how
organizations work (Boje, 1995). It is for this reason that we wish to analyse
Rising Sun.

Synopsis
Before we start our analysis, it is important to provide a synopsis of the film for
the benefit of readers who are not familiar with the story-line.
Rising Sun is a big city murder mystery which renews the conventions of the
genre by focusing on the cross-cultural relationships between the Japanese and
American members of a Japanese transplant organization. The film’s early
scenes introduce us to a crucial location: the Nakamoto Corporation boardroom.
At first we come to know it as the site of the negotiations for Nakamoto’s
proposed acquisition of Microcon Corporation, a small US company which
possesses a vital defence technology. Two of the pivotal characters we meet at
this time are Richmond, an unethical American attorney who works for
Nakamoto, and US Senator Morton, who is trying to block the acquisition. Our
second exposure to the boardroom occurs later that night: during a posh party
celebrating the opening of Nakamoto’s Los Angeles building, a murder victim
(Cheryl Austin) is discovered on the boardroom table. (This juxtaposition of the
negotiations and the murder contains some of the film’s more interesting
implications.)
JOCM A pair of detectives, Web and Connor (played respectively by Wesley Snipes
9,3 and Sean Connery), are called on to unravel the mystery. Having worked in
Japan for many years, Connor is well respected by the Japanese and deeply
knowledgeable about the culture. Web, an African American, is a novice in such
cultural relations. The key element in their investigation is a CD-ROM recording
produced by Nakamoto’s 24-hour video surveillance system. The recording
46 indicates that Eddie Sakamura, the murder victim’s boyfriend and the son of a
Japanese business magnate, strangled Cheryl while having sex with her on the
boardroom table. The strangulation appears to be accidental in that Cheryl likes
to have her sexual experience intensified by temporary asphyxia. Eddie just
went a little too far this time.
However, with the technical assistance of Connor’s Japanese African
American girlfriend, the detectives discover that the digital recording has been
manipulated and falsified to frame Eddie Sakamura. When Sakamura turns up
with the original unrevised CD-ROM, we learn that Senator Morton was
Cheryl’s boardroom lover, and that Richmond murdered her after Morton leaves
the scene. Richmond’s motivation: he uses the recording of the married Morton’s
tryst to blackmail the Senator so that he will stop trying to block the Microcon
sale.
At the end of the film, Connor goes off to play golf. Web, who is attracted to
Connor’s girlfriend Jingo, drives her home. In a very ambiguous final scene,
neither Web nor the spectator can decide whether Jingo is responding sexually
to the detective.

Representations and organizational analysis

To support our analysis, we start from the premiss that all we can ever have
with respect to organizations of any sort is a simulacrum, a representation, or a
text (terms which are interlinked). These may be found in a variety of places: the
annual report of a company; an essay in a journal; a consultant’s report based
on standard interviewing and survey procedures; a complex multifaceted image
stored in the memory of the employees of a Microsoft or a Johnson Controls; or
a film, such as Rising Sun, which deals with an organization. As these examples
imply, the representational logic that enables our thinking about organizations
is linguistic and, consequently, our access to and knowledge of organizations is
always mediated by language. The term, as we use it, refers not only to formal
languages such as Japanese and English, but also to any meaningful system of
signifiers such as the pictorial elements in a film, or the linguistic structures
and relationships which Lacan (1968) argues are the essence of the unconscious.
In other words, wherever we may look for the reality or the presence of an
organization, what we will find will be a set of signifiers, a simulacrum, a
representation, or a text. In Derridean terms, what we will always find will be
but the traces signifying the absence of a presence. There has been a plethora of
writing in this field; for example, Thatchenkery (1992) has argued that
organizations can be understood as texts; Boje (1995) shows the storytelling
that goes on in all forms of representations.
 The purpose of this analysis is to raise a question: to which of the Filmic
simulacra/representations/texts do we give priority when seeking knowledge of representations
an organization? The tendency in the past has been to assign a privileged status
to the representations produced by science and to treat various other forms as
having less value. In the resulting hierarchy, quantitative numerical
representations have been deemed to have superior analytical power while
those dealing in metaphor and figuration (as in Rising Sun) have been taken 47
less seriously. The post-structuralist subversion of this science/story/binary
opposition can be traced to a variety of sources (e.g., Baudrillard, 1994; Boje,
1995; Gergen, 1994; Hassard, 1994; Morgan, 1986), most notably Lyotard’s
(1978-84) seminal report on the condition of knowledge. Using a typical
deconstructive move, Lyotard collapses the distinction between science and
story and assimilates them into one category – the narrative. From this
perspective, science is but one of the hegemonic grand narratives which have
gained dominance in the west through powerful modes of naturalizing self-
legitimation.
Lyotard (1984) defines as modern “any science that legitimates itself with
reference to a metadiscourse”. He builds his argument on the evidence gathered
from primitive societies such as the Cashinahua Indians of South America – his
favourite example. For the Cashinahua, narrative functions are embodied in
clear sets of rules about who has the right to speak and who has the
responsibility to listen. In this group, a speaker begins his narrative by
identifying himself with his Cashinahua name, thereby affirming his tribal
authenticity and consequent right to speak. In the process, he also evokes the
listener’s responsibility to listen. Lyotard considers this as an example of self-
legitimation established by the telling of a story in a certain way. A set of
pragmatic rules that constitutes the social bond is transmitted through these
narratives. Thus, the strength of the narrative form, or metadiscourse, lies in its
ability to ground the very rules of the language game on which its existence is
predicated.

Deconstructing science
Beginning in the eighteenth century, science has struggled to repudiate this
kind of self-legitimating language game, which it regards as the product of
superstition, ignorance, prejudice and ideology. What’s the alternative?
Whereas primitive narrative does not require any form of legitimation outside
the realm of its own performance, scientific knowledge claims to validate itself
by the objectivity, rigour and systematicity of its procedures – the renowned
and time-tested scientific method. However, Lyotard contends that the vaunted
method is just another self-validating narrative. He identifies two specific forms
of narrative on which the claims of scientific objectivity depend: one is political,
the other philosophical. The political narrative is represented by the
Enlightenment which is a narrative of the gradual emancipation of humanity
from slavery and class oppression. Science supposedly played a key role in this
movement by making knowledge available to all and thereby helping in the
JOCM attainment of absolute freedom. The philosophical narrative is Hegelian in
9,3 character in that knowledge is regarded as a prime part of the gradual evolution
through history of self-conscious mind. Lyotard maintains that these grand
narratives subordinate, organize and account for local narratives (e.g. stories
about scientific discoveries or personal growth and self-actualization), which in
a circular and self-fulfilling fashion confirm the grand narratives of the
48 emancipation of humanity and/or the reality of a pure self-conscious Spirit.
Thus, according to Lyotard, the claims for scientific objectivity are paradoxical:
the scientific knowledge which depends at one level on the suppression and
denunciation of narratives, is thereby condemned to a dependence at a higher
level on a narrative of legitimation, a “meta-narrative” or “grand narrative”
(Connor, 1989, p. 30). To quote Lyotard (1984, p. 29):
Scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without
resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no
knowledge at all. Without such recourse it would be in the position of presupposing its own
validity and would be stooping to what it condemns: begging the question, proceeding on
prejudice.

The very existence of this critique suggests that the naturalizing process which
privileged science is no longer as seamless as it once was. The result is a
conceptual space within which it is possible to pursue the claims to knowledge
made by other narratives and other texts (Boje, 1995; Boland and Tenkasi, 1995;
Gergen, 1994; Thatchenkery, 1992).
We may be guided in this endeavour by the new historicist work of Stephen
Greenblatt (1988), which is derived in part from the historical modes of enquiry
Michel Foucault (1970) deployed in the Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. The new historicists look for epistemic similarities between
the different discourses in a given historical period. Thus, Greenblatt (1988)
locates parallel narratives in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in seventeenth-
century reports of New World exploration. This parallel is neither direct nor
obvious; rather, it is the discursive relationships (which emerge only as a result
of Greenblatt’s interpretative work) between non-fiction expositions of
particularly important states of affairs and their figural representation in a
theatrical fiction. Rather than privilege either of these texts, Greenblatt treats
them as co-equal representations of the discursive dominants of the period.

Discourse, knowledge and organizations

In this context, Foucault’s (1975) notion of discourse should be considered.
Discourse is “a set of ideas and practices which condition our ways of relating to,
and acting upon, particular phenomena” (Knights and Morgan, 1991, p. 253). For
example, Foucault claims that the concept of madness is constructed in particular
social contexts. Once such a concept emerges, i.e. when actors come to understand
the world in its terms, then social practices develop which reproduce this
perception as “truth”. This power-knowledge nexus appears in the relationship
between the political activists and “experts” who generated a persuasive
discourse on madness, and the physical segregation of the mad and the insane by
means of a system of incarceration. Such an exercise of power institutionalizes Filmic
the enabling knowledge which then assumes the guise of indisputable “truth”. representations
As Knights and Morgan note, “A discourse is not then simply a way of seeing; it
is always embedded in social practices which reproduce that way of seeing as
the truth of discourse” (1991, p. 253). As such, Foucault’s use of discourse
signifies a collection of activities, events, circumstances and objects which
together make up or fabricate a particular world view. 49
This assemblage includes both texts and organizations which, if they are
part of the same historical world view, are difficult to distinguish from one
another, and local embodiments of a discourse that cuts across cultural
boundaries. This view of discourse, texts and organizations leads us to the
following three enabling principles of the study that follows: first, that texts –
though distributed in different discursive locations in a particular socio-
historical period – embody similar concerns and preoccupations. Second, that
all texts are fictions, and that none can claim to do a better job representing
truth or reality. Third, that the work of an artist expresses inexplicitly what is
dealt with more directly in the work of prose expositors.

Implications
We believe that an organizational analysis of feature films should take these
assumptions into consideration. The practice we employ juxtaposes an analysis
of the film with relevant commentary from the field of organizational studies,
assuming – as we do – that both the film and the studies are parallel
representations, each contributing in its own way to our understanding of
organizations. In some cases, the film text unambiguously projects its
knowledge of the organization; in others, we must extract the complex meaning
from images and filmic action.
We treat these images and incidents as signifiers whose logic may be traced
back to the organizational knowledge of the film’s collective makers. Not having
been derived from the deliberate study of organizations, this knowledge is not
available as a systematic and formal articulation; rather, it is tacit, inexplicit,
and figural. Nor is it the insight of an autonomous modernist creator. Following
the post-modern dictum that “language speaks us”, we see the film language
and its implied organizational knowledge as a cultural formation which
expresses itself through the collective agency of the film’s producers, directors
and writers. In their effort to manufacture a gripping and plausible dramatic
spectacle, they attempt (both deliberately and intuitively) to root the film in the
cultural exigencies of the moment. When they succeed (the box office tells us
about the magnitude of Rising Sun’s cultural success), it is because the film has
managed to capture something significant – in this case, something significant
about the transplant organization. For this reason, we contend that Rising Sun
may be seen as being loosely equivalent to a research report about a transplant
organization. What distinguishes these representations of organizations is not
the representations themselves so much as the rules of interpretation brought to
bear on them.
JOCM Rising Sun and the transplant organization
9,3 So what does Rising Sun have to tell us about the transplant organization?
Much of the argument to follow reflects Derrida’s claim that authors cannot
control the received meaning of their texts. In similar fashion, we see Rising Sun
as a deconstructive assault on the notion that managers/authors can construct
a strategic plan which then mechanistically governs the corporation’s activities.
50 The name of the Nakamoto Corporation, the stoic presence of its executives,
and its commanding Los Angeles tower, present themselves as the signifiers of
a well ordered management strategy, one that emphasizes control and
predictive power. Yet the film’s unfolding events prove that the appearance of
organizational stability is a modernist façade behind which is a virtual pastiche
of widely dispersed human interactions amid unpredictable power relations.
The executives, Ishihara and Richmond, are the principal representatives of
Nakamoto’s efforts to control the outcome of the Microcon negotiations. Seizing
on Senator Morton’s dalliance with Cheryl Austin, they are opportunistic in
their appropriation of events which can serve their interests. They are able to
deploy the significant resources required to alter the CD-ROM record of the
resulting murder. By framing Sakamura, they deflect attention away from
themselves and thereby construct a screen which conceals their involvement
and misdirects their opponents.
In brief, they are able to build an organizational system which, for a while,
successfully moves Nakamoto closer to its goal, the acquisition of Microcon. But
in every system, as in every text, there is an element of free play which defies its
author’s attempts at total control. In an organization, the element of free play
and unpredictability is a function of people and the multiplex vagaries of their
behaviour. For any number of reasons, people can not or will not do as they are
expected. In this category we place Web, Connor and Sakamura, in as much as
they resist Nakamoto’s will to power and eventually frustrate the company’s
efforts.

Chaos theory and the production of hybrids

Recent developments in the application of chaos theory to organizations
(Gemmill and Smith, 1985; Levy, 1994; Priesmeyer and Davis, 1991; Stacey,
1995) are relevant to the above. For example, Thietart and Forgues (1995), in a
detailed study of chaotic systems, contend that organizations are always in one
of three states: stable equilibrium, periodic equilibrium, or chaos. The greater
the number of counteracting forces at work in an organization, the higher the
likelihood of encountering chaos, which they define as a state of extreme
uncertainty. All it takes to move into a chaotic state is a progressive and
continuous change of relationship between two or more variables. Thus, a small
change can lead to dramatically unexpected results (Lorenz, 1963), highly
problematic short-term predictability, and impossible long-term forecasting.
The counteracting forces in Nakamoto are rife in large measure because it is
a transplant, a condition which sorely stresses the members of the organization
and burdens them with the constant need to negotiate their cross-cultural
relationships. This condition is chaotic but it is also necessary and productive. Filmic
In an effort to create connections, to open channels of communication, and to representations
produce meaning, the cross-cultural interactions in a transplant synthesize two
different cultures and two different modes of being. The new forms of behaviour
produced in this chaotic zone are hybrids. They are new combinations and thus
unpredictable and often unstable. Some prove to be successful, some do not. The
organization of Rising Sun’s opening sequence mimics this synthesis with a set 51
of visual hybrids linked together by the factitious logic of film editing. We begin
with this example because much of what we have to say about the organization
of the film (itself a paradigm of networks) is applicable to the organization of the
transplant. In other words, the film is designed in a way that compels its
spectators to experience the same kinds of chaotic cross-cultural problems
encountered by the characters within the fiction. In simple terms, we may say
that the chaotic relations in a transplant result in the formation of hybrids
which are either successful (in that they provide meaning and orientation) or
unsuccessful (in that they produce confusion and disorientation). An example of
each follows.
Demonstrating how hybrids make it possible for us to access the meaning of
another culture’s forms and practices, the film’s very first visuals juxtapose
English and Japanese versions of the title Rising Sun. Unless we can read
Japanese, the Japanese title signifies only that it is a Japanese title. It simply and
powerfully epitomizes the barriers to cross-cultural understanding in that it
appears as an aesthetically interesting configuration (like an abstract painting)
whose meaning, if any, remains unavailable. (This is the equivalent of listening,
say, to Japanese without understanding what it means.) The only means of
access to a different language or to a different culture is the formation of a
hybrid – in this case the juxtaposition of English and Japanese – which splices
together equivalents from both cultures and creates a border crossing where
two-way communication is possible. Much of the film is about the failures and
successes of this organizational process. Detective Connor personifies
successful integration and adaptation because of his extensive knowledge of
both cultures and both languages. He is a hybrid, a successful one because he
has learned how to create the cultural equivalents which enable cross-cultural
communication and the formation of a productive equilibrium.

Cross-cultural barriers
Let us now consider an example of a hybrid which does not succeed. Having
used bilingual titles to ease us into the cross-cultural experience to follow, the
film temporarily deprives its spectators of that comforting sense of meaning
and purpose and plunges them into disorientation and uncertainty. Recall our
contention that this filmic experience is the equivalent of the experience of a real
actor in a chaotic organization like Nakamoto. This disorientation and the need
for adaptation is the dark side of new organizational forms (Zald, 1993). In an
editorial to a special issue of Organization Science on this topic, Victor and
Stephens (1994) argue that such new organizational forms extract a price from
JOCM everyone involved because of the incessant demand for innovation and
9,3 adaptation. In another study, Miner and Robinson (1994) show that such
organizations generate career patterns reflecting an underlying logic of
organizational learning, rather than producing simple atomistic exchanges
between unfettered actors. And Mirvis and Hall (1994) argue that the new
workers must, more than anything else, integrate diverse experiences into their
52 identities. The spectators of Rising Sun are, at times, placed in a comparable
situation.
The first time this happens is immediately after the titles when we see shots
from a Serge Leone-type cowboy film with an ersatz Clint Eastwood character
played by an unnamed Japanese actor. The scene just does not make any sense.
It disorients us because – with the possible exception of the Japanese actor – it
is inconsistent with the expectations that we bring to our screening of Rising
Sun. Why are we watching a cowboy film when what we have been expecting
is a late twentieth-century Japanese-American business conflict? For the few
moments before we discover that the cowboy film is actually a film within the
main film, the narrative logic of what is happening escapes us. Our inability to
make sense of what we are seeing momentarily threatens to breach the
somnambulistic state of the spectators and to remind us that we are attempting
to enter into the film’s imaginary world. We are unable to make more than a
superficial interpretation of what is going on: in part, because we are being
initiated into a hybrid life-world, a borderland where unfamiliar cultural forms
and practices deconstruct that smooth and relatively continuous experience we
call reality.
We contend that this is what happens as a normal and everyday occurrence
in the transplant. Managers and employees are regularly confronted with faulty
communication, confusion and disorientation as they struggle to find the
cultural equivalents (like the juxtaposed English and Japanese titles) which
forge a common meaning and a common purpose. These equivalents are, of
necessity, hybrids or blurred genres which typically produce some disruption
(even as they allow meanings to be shared) partly because it is rare to find exact
cultural equivalents; partly because the hybrids must overcome a culture’s
monological resistance to innovation. People generally prefer the old way of
doing business. This is one of the problems faced by the transplant
organization and is represented in the film by one Detective Graham, a
character whose national chauvinism and racism make it impossible for him to
understand or to empathize with the Japanese.

Social construction of the transplant

As Morgan (1986) and Franke et al. (1991) indicate, every culture constructs its
own reality, and thereby fundamentally governs the ways in which culturally
diverse organizational actors see one another. Similarly, Gergen (1985, 1994) has
articulated the socially constructed nature of all forms of understandings about
organizations. The Harvard Business Review’s “The boundaries of business
world leadership survey” (Kanter, 1991) makes a related point. With the help of
leading local business journals, HBR surveyed managers in 25 countries to get Filmic
a sense of the impact of the globalization of business. The survey demonstrated representations
unequivocally that cultural affinity more than geographic proximity is a major
determinant of a manager’s views. To a certain degree, the problems produced
by cultural and subcultural affinities and biases afflict all organizations,
particularly when they are required to innovate and accommodate in the face of
unprecedented circumstances. Such problems are especially acute for the 53
transplant which, unlike indigenous corporations, cannot so easily internalize
and automate the work required to accommodate the ecosystem of another
culture.
The organization of the film is instructive about the way in which diverse
cultural perspectives are stitched together into a meaningful and integrated
whole. Consider what the spectator sees in quick succession after the cowboy
shots described above. As the camera pulls back, we see that the cowboy
images are playing on a video monitor in a karaoke bar, and that a young
Japanese man (Eddie Sakamura) is singing the words to a country song –
“Don’t fence me in”. This quixotic cross-cultural pastiche is further reinforced
by four more disclosures: first, Eddie’s Yakuza bodyguards simulating a
Motown back-up foursome; second, the bored blonde (Eddie’s interracial pet,
the soon to be murdered Cheryl Austin) who watches with annoyance from the
bar and then disgustedly walks outside where the pursuing Eddie angrily
coerces her into his car. Third, as they drive off, the camera tilts up to reveal the
Nakamoto tower; and, fourth, we cut to its interior for the first shot of the
Microcon negotiations.
The intermix of genres, objects, nationalities and cultural practices – the
titles, the Japanese cowboy film, Eddie and Cheryl, the Yakuza crooners, the
Nakamoto building, and the Microcon negotiators – are positioned vis-à-vis one
another in a stream of audiovisual images that not only makes tentative sense
but contains the implications which the film works out as it unfolds. Rising
Sun’s meaning – the end product of the filmic organization – is in constant
negotiation as the stream of images builds within the spectator an ever-
changing synchronic structure (a conceptual network) which is what makes it
possible to interpret each frame in the diachronic succession of frames.
We can make the same point about the transplanted Nakamoto Corporation.
It is an ever shifting constellation of elements whose collective meaning
changes as more of the organization comes into view. We do not mean to
suggest that Nakamoto is something like an iceberg whose structure, though
concealed, is always present. Rather, it is an entity which is always coming into
being, a hybrid whose activity consists of an ongoing set of spontaneous
negotiations that seek out symbiotic interconnections in the cultural field. As
indicated by Gray et al. (1985), organizations are dynamic processes through
which meaning is simultaneously constructed and destroyed. At any time,
meaning will be ordered along a continuum which varies according to the
degree of coincidence these meanings have among the members of the
organization. At one end of the continuum meanings are entirely idiosyncratic;
JOCM in the middle, meanings are widely held; and, at the other end, meanings are
9,3 deeply internalized. On the one hand, Nakamoto is relatively stable because of
a shared core of coincident concepts, relationships and values (most of which
are Japanese). These coincidental meanings are crystallized as informal and
formal structures and are sustained by the powerful Nakamoto top
management. On the other hand, meaning is constantly negotiated and revised
54 as US interventions (represented by Senator Morton and the LAPD detectives)
have an impact on Nakamoto’s behaviour and compel an altered interpretation
of events.
As a result, we contend that the transplant has no clearly defined formal
boundaries. Its presence in another culture creates a growth process which is
unpredictable. However, control and power remain the major issues, as is
suggested early on: first, in microcosm, by Eddie Sakamura’s inability to
impose his will on Cheryl Austin; and, second, by the enigmatic relationship
between Cheryl’s murder and the Microcon negotiations, both of which take
place in the Nakamoto boardroom.
As a conventional symbol of power, the boardroom presents itself as the
ultimate locus of authority and control. But we can see in retrospect that it is
merely a representational space within which decisions that have been
determined elsewhere are ritually enacted. Gilmore et al. (1994) suggest that real
organizations have similar power concerns in that current leaders have to pay
attention to four “new” boundaries:
(1) the authority boundary, which concerns who leads and follows;
(2) the task boundary, which concerns who does what, how the work is
divided up, and the sequence of activities that creates the best result;
(3) the political boundary, which becomes evident when professional and
occupational groups protect their legitimate economic interests; and
(4) the identity boundary, which deals with emotional connections to
different groups.
None of these boundaries is clearly demarcated and the activities which they
attempt to circumscribe resist conventional means of control and
categorization.
Note, accordingly, in Rising Sun, the relationship between Cheryl Austin and
her various lovers, Connor’s golf games with his Japanese associates, the
electronic disclosure of the doctored CD-ROM, Senator Morton’s suicide – these
are typical of the critical activities which are outside Nakamoto’s formal
structure but, nonetheless, deeply affect its attempt to acquire Microcon. These
uncontainable externalities are well represented in the early part of the film
when we cut from the boardroom negotiations to a broadcast of Senator
Morton’s opposition to the sale of Microcon.

Digital surveillance and organizational power

This video event and its context call for analysis. The rigid formality of the
negotiations creates a visual interface between the respective executives of
Nakamoto and Microcon, who confront one another across a massive table. This Filmic
proceeding seems highly codified in that it follows rules of engagement which representations
appear to be obvious to the participants. There is, however, a participant – the
electronic eavesdropper, the security director, Mr Tanaka – whose presence is
hidden from the Microcon executives. Monitoring the action via video cameras
and reporting private Microcon conversations through an earplug worn by
Ishawara, Tanaka is both a participant in a covert command and control 55
structure and a part of a virtual organization (because of his remote electronic
connection) which will eventually subvert its own attempts at control.
Baudrillard’s (1994) notion of the simulacrum plays very well here. The people
in the boardroom do not recognize that they are being watched and monitored.
Their recorded activity becomes a text that is deconstructed or denatured with
the help of video. However, the video itself can be manipulated, creating the
position that every simulacrum is in a way embedded in related simulacra. The
resulting confusion about what is and is not real is a significant problem for
management which, of course, depends on good intelligence to govern its
actions.
The Nakamoto surveillance system is the most advanced version of the
Benthamite panopticon discussed by Foucault as the archetype of centralizing
hierarchical powers. It is the eye which, positioned in a point of advantage, sees
everything and thereby imposes its discipline on those it observes. However, the
film suggests that panoptic power, when hybridized with digital technology,
subverts the centralizing controls of the system’s architects. On the one hand,
the powers of digital recording and replication do vest increased control in the
hands of those who can mine and manipulate the historical archive that results.
Ishiwara and Richmond use the original recording of Cheryl’s death, first, to
blackmail Senator Morton and, second, to frame Eddie Sakamura as the
murderer. On the other hand, the computer-assisted technologies of
miniaturization and high fidelity recording (in this case, CD-ROM) enable the
analysis, portability and widescale reproduction of the surveillance. As with a
text, its author cannot control its destiny once it leaves her hand. Like all
simulacra, it is free to be appropriated and exploited by others. Thus, once the
CD-ROM falls into Connor’s hands, he has the means by which to unravel the
murder mystery.
We might say, then, that an electronic technology which physically
distributes the organization also disperses control. The second electronic
interruption of the negotiations – the Senator Morton broadcast, to which
everyone in the room attends – makes this point. Like Tanaka, Morton is also an
absent presence of a virtual corporation which disrupts and transgresses the
neatly defined (though fictive) boundaries of the modernist organization and
compels a much more collective decision-making process than might otherwise
be the case. In simple terms, Nakamoto’s efforts to transplant itself in the United
States inevitably extend the organization into the domain of national politics, or
– looked at from another perspective – brings national politics inside the
transplant organization. Senator Morton is, in effect, an unpaid member of the
JOCM company, even if his efforts appear to oppose the Microcon acquisition. The fact
9,3 is, what he has to say has an immediate bearing on the future of the corporation
and must be taken into consideration, particularly because the broadcast of his
criticism feeds a large and diverse audience which Morton comes to represent.
His image on a television screen – a mass medium – signifies the involvement of
the masses in what might otherwise look like Nakamoto’s appropriately private
56 decision-making process. It also deconstructs the notion of a singular central
power which can operate independently of those who are affected by its
decisions.
This interpenetration of various interests typifies the fuzzy zone inhabited by
the transplant organization. Within this zone, the forces of co-operation and
competition are both hard at work and hard to distinguish from one another. In
Thompson’s terms (1967, p. 6) the transplant is a nonlinear dynamic chaotic
system, that is, a set of interdependent parts, each contributing something and
receiving something from the whole which they collectively constitute. The
whole is, in addition, interdependent with a larger environment, producing
organizational actors with multiple agendas in a complex set of internal and
external dynamics.

Cultural hegemony
Orchestrating much of the action within Rising Sun’s interdependent social
environments is the fear of an apparent shift of socio-economic power from the
United States to Japan. The presence of a Japanese-built Japanese building on
US territory suggests to more than one character that all the power relations of
a dominant west are in danger of being reversed, that a new master narrative is
reiterating itself, one in which Japan is the logocentric master and the west the
subservient.
Within the film world, the Japanese yen is strong enough for the Nakamoto
executives to be able to buy anything they want. This includes the complicity of
Americans whose labour and expertise support the Japanese enterprise – even
when the interests of that enterprise conflict with those of the United States.
The French post-structuralist Althusser (1971) describes such a situation (one
in which people are compelled to act unwittingly against their own interests) in
terms of the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. the reproduction of
a given set of dominant organizing principles which establish hierarchies,
orchestrate behaviour, vest decision-making power, dispose labour and other
resources, and generate and accumulate capital. This control over the
circumstances of production is doubly powerful in that it also affects values in
other domains. The result is hegemony, a mode of economic and organizational
life which pervades the cultural domain and works there either to maintain or
to revise dominant values and the actions which follow from them. The
Japanese-American transplant is of special interest in this regard because of its
interface on US soil of dominant Asians and less powerful Americans, an
unprecedented and particularly uncomfortable condition for Americans to bear.
 This is nowhere more apparent than in the eroticized figure of the murder Filmic
victim, Cheryl Austin. Our intent will be to strip away that eroticism so that we representations
can see her as a human and symbolic resource, subject to the management
decisions of the transplant organization. We start with the reminder that
constant work (of two sorts) is required to keep in place and maintain (i.e.
reproduce) any particular set of relations of production. The first kind of work
is economic. The second is ideological. Working in tandem, they organize the 57
mental life of people so that a prevailing, though factitious, order of things
assumes the appearance of the natural and the necessary. Japanese
appropriation of the erotic body (Cheryl) symbolically serves this end and
typifies the way in which the influence of powerful managers extends beyond
the formal boundaries of an organization. What is at stake in Rising Sun is the
ideological control of a home-grown American image and its appropriation for
support of a potential colonial power whose hegemonic and monological will
threatens to take over the US as a system of production.
A statuesque blonde from Kentucky, Cheryl conforms to the profile of a
fashion model. In Detective Graham’s words, she could have been a Rose Bowl
queen – a fresh and robust epitome of innocent sexuality and middle-class
American culture. As such, Cheryl represents a familiar ideal of American
womanhood: she is the ultimate object of desire, the incarnation of sexuality.
She is the best that America has to offer in this domain. Of this, the Japanese
(Eddie Sakamura in particular) are well aware. They too are subject to the
seductive power of her image. And it comes as no surprise that their world is
populated with Cheryl look-alikes: the tall blondes who seem rather absurd
juxtaposed with their short and ageing Japanese partners at the Nakamoto
party; and the women at the Japanese brothel where Sakamura houses Cheryl.
These objects of desire are at once both trivial and culturally significant. That
is, the eroticized female body can be commodified with relative ease and
assigned a monetary value which, though high by middle-class standards, is
inexpensive in relation to the corporate budget of a billion-dollar transplant
organization. In this respect, it is of no particular consequence since it is a
consumable in abundant supply. (Detective Graham, ever the realist, aptly
describes Cheryl’s body as a piece of sushi – a raw commodity that has special
appeal for the Japanese.)
On the other hand, the erotic body in its symbolic aspect is of major cultural
importance: first, because of its role as a signifier of excellence; and, second,
because of its nascent connections to the issue of motherhood and (symbolic)
reproduction. As a signifier of excellence, the beautiful female body says that
whatever it accompanies is powerful, valuable and to be attended to. Which is why
it appears so frequently in mass media productions, in advertisements, and in the
company of rich and impressive men. The beautiful female body participates in
the reproduction of the relations of production because it is drawn towards power
and is then used to make that power attractive. As a source of psychological and
physical pleasure, it is a reward; as a signifier of excellence, it is a legitimation. In
either case, Cheryl is a domestic resource which comes under the control of the
JOCM Japanese and raises the spectre of the foreign appropriation and monopolization of
9,3 the very stuff that sustains American culture.

Fear of the other

As the plot develops, Cheryl (by virtue of her murder) moves from the margin of
organizational concern to its centre. This is signified by her position on the
58 boardroom table where the Microcon negotiations had been taking place. The
overlap of representations brings together:
• an erotic body whose energies have been placed at the service of the
Japanese;
• the Stealth bomber and its function as representative of a home-grown
US technology which is in danger of Japanese appropriation (a model of
the bomber can be seen on the boardroom table during the negotiations
at the start of the film);
• and the company called Microcon.
Management control of the woman, the bomber, and the company are the short-
term stakes in an economic competition which is not unusual – except for the
fact that the dominant competitor is Asian. Given this racial framework, the
short-term benefits of control and acquisition are reinterpreted and re-evaluated
as a matter of long-term cultural survival. To the victor goes the right to
reproduce, in all senses of the word. And this possibility weighs heavily on all
of Nakamoto’s transactions in its US environment. The result is a double bind:
for Nakamoto’s economic strategy to succeed, it must integrate itself with
American culture. Yet, integration and success generate resistance because of
the fear of domination. What Rising Sun allows us to do is to imagine how the
anxiety stimulated by such a corporate success would be compounded by the
addition of xenophobia.
From a discursive point of view, this fear is about the formation of a new
grand narrative which, as a correlative to the tale of Japanese technical and
managerial superiority, revises the myth of white European supremacy. Rising
Sun draws much of its power from the audience’s investment in these grand
narratives. The audience is captivated by fear while the Japanese grand
narrative controls events; then they are gratified when the film’s resolution
reworks the narrative of white superiority and allows the heroic American
detective, Connor, to unravel the murder/industrial mystery, reveal the collusion
between Ishahara and Richmond, and prevent (for the moment) Nakamoto’s
takeover of Microcon.

Managing ambiguity
Had the film ended at this point, it would leave us with little else to ponder about
the characteristics of the transplant. But the film continues beyond its formal
resolution and returns us to the complex cross-cultural uncertainties of a life
without grand narratives.
 In the closing interaction, Web once again plays the American naïf who Filmic
thinks he understands what is going on (namely, that the crime has been solved representations
and the perpetrators punished). In this respect he is, temporarily, a projection of
the audience which has also concluded, temporarily, that the film and plot have
achieved resolution and closure. Yet, a fissure opens between Web and the
audience through the agency of Jingo. Her frustrating response (“If you say so”)
to his claim to understanding raises an initial doubt. Jingo’s statement is the 59
necessarily deconstructive endnote which keeps the mystery intact and avoids
closure despite disclosure. Furthermore, the sense of mystery expands as Jingo
suddenly begins to let down her hair (a signifier which usually suggests female
sexual receptivity). This significant action is countered by the revelation that
she is Connor’s woman, a fact which, within Web’s repertoire of cultural
responses, inhibits a sexual advance on his part. Other than the fact that she has
let down her hair, her demeanour seems to project an icy indifference when she
says goodbye. Last, when the door which she has closed behind her suddenly
swings open, Web (and the audience) is left in a state of uncertainty about what
is going on. Instead of a neat package of clarifications and answers, we are
suddenly left with questions? Is the apparent resolution of the murder mystery
an illusion? What exactly is Jingo trying to tell Web?

Making cross-cultural meaning

Are we not here asked to contemplate once again the central problematic of the
transplant organization? It is a union of others, a joining of diverse cultures and
value systems, which brings together a group of actors with common desires
that articulate themselves in different ways. These differences produce anxiety,
inhibit action, generate uncertainty (also known as mystery), and require the
formation – as it were – of a new set of rules to govern and direct behaviour in
the novel terrain of the transnational environment. It is as if the film were
starting all over again in an effort to figure out how to negotiate life in this
realm. The couple with which the film began – Cheryl Austin and Eddie
Sakamura – could not adapt so they have been replaced by a new entry in the
field: Jingo and Web. The challenges of meaning and interpretation are no less
daunting but, Jingo and Web – who are a racial mix of Japanese, European and
African – are already hybrids, which may give them an advantage.
This is the postulate the film leaves with us. It quite properly leads us to
anticipation rather than closure because the transplant, like the post-modern
condition within which it resides, is emerging too rapidly to be comprehended.
Not having any useful precedents which can guide our understanding of the
hybrids taking shape in this period of emergence, all we can do is whatever we
do. Translated into a prescription for managerial performance, the message of
Rising Sun tells us to expect uncertainty, to experiment and to transgress
boundaries. The filmic representation also shows the importance of thriving on
chaos (Peters, 1992) and the need to conceive organizations as paradoxical
(Handy, 1994) systems where mutually opposing elements exist simultaneously.
JOCM References and further reading
Althusser, L. (1971), Lenin, Philosophy, and Other Essays, (trans: Ben Brewster), Monthly Review
9,3 Press, New York, NY.
Astley, W. G. and Zammuto, R. F. (1992), “Organization science, managers, and language games”,
Organization Science, Vol. 3 No. 4, pp. 443-60.
Baudrillard, J. (1994), Simulcra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Boje, D. (1995), “Stories of the storytelling organization: a postmodern analysis of Disney as
60 Tamara-Land”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 38 No. 4, pp. 997-1035.
Boland, R. J. and Tenkasi, R. V. (1995), “Perspective making and perspective taking in
communities of knowing”, Organization Science, Vol. 4 No. 6, pp. 350-72.
Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (1986), Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Connor, S. (1989), Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to the Theories of the Contemporary,
Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, MA.
Denzin, N. (1991), Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema, Sage,
Newbury Park, CA.
Devida, J. (1970), “Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences”, in Macksey,
R. and Donato, E. (Eds), The Structuralist Controversy, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, MD.
Fiol, M. (1989), “A semiotic analysis of corporate language: organizational boundaries and joint
venturing”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 34 No. 2, pp. 277-303.
Fiol, M. (1991), “Seeing the empty spaces: toward a more complete understanding of the meaning
of power in organizations”, Organization Studies, Vol. 12 No. 4, pp. 547-66.
Foucault, M. (1970), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (trans: Alan
Sheridan), Pantheon, New York, NY.
Foucault, M. (1975), Discipline and Punish, Vintage, New York, NY.
Franke, R.H., Hofstede, G. and Bond, M. (1991), “Cultural roots of economic performance: a
research note”, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 12, pp. 165-73.
Geertz, C. (1983), Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, Basic Books,
New York, NY.
Gemmill, G. and Smith, C. (1985), “A dissipitative structure model of organizational
transformation”, Human Relations, Vol. 38 No. 8, pp. 751-66.
Gergen, K.J. (1985), “The social constructionism movement in modern psychology”, American
Psychologist, Vol. 40, pp. 266-75.
Gergen, K.J. (1994), Toward Transformation in Social Knowledge, 2nd ed., Sage, Thousand Oaks,
CA.
Gilmore, T., Hirschhorn, C. and O’Connor, M. (1994), “The boundaryless organization”, Healthcare
Forum, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 68-72.
Gray, B., Bougon, M. and Donnellon, A. (1985), “Organizations as constructions and destructions
of meaning”, Journal of Management, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 83-98.
Greenblatt, S. (1988), Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in
Renaissance England, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Handy, C. (1994), The Age of Paradox, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.
Hassard, J. (1994), “Postmodern organizational analysis: toward a conceptual framework”,
Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 303-24.
Kanter, R.M. (1991), “Transcending business boundaries: 12,000 world managers view change”,
Harvard Business Review,Vol. 69 No. 3, pp. 93-115.
Knights, D. and Morgan, G. (1991), “Corporate strategy, organizations, and subjectivity: a
critique”, Organization Studies, Vol. 12, pp. 251-73.
Lacan, J. (1968), Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (trans: Anthony Wilden), Johns Hopkins Filmic
University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Levy, D. (1994), “Chaos theory and strategy: theory, application, and managerial implications”,
representations
Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 15, pp. 167-78.
Lorenz, E. (1963), “Deterministic nonperiodic flow”, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 20,
pp. 130-41.
Lyotard, J-F. (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, MN. 61
Mauws, M. K. and Phillips, N. (1995), “Understanding language games”, Organization Science,
Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 322-34.
Miner, A., and Robinson, D. (1994), “Organizational and population level learning as engines for
career transitions”, Journal of Organizational Behaviour, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 345-54.
Mirvis, P. and Hall, D. (1994), “Psychological success and the boundaryless career”, Journal of
Organizational Behaviour, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 365-80.
Morgan, G. (1986), Images of Organization, Sage, Newbury Park, CA.
Morgan, G. (1993), Imaginization. The Art of Creative Management, Sage, Newbury Park, CA.
Peters, T. (1992), Liberation Management, Fawcett-Columbine, New York, NY.
Phillips, N. (1995), “Telling organizational tales: on the role of narrative fiction in the study of
organizations”, Organization Studies, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 625-49.
Priesmeyer, R. and Davis, J. (1991), “Chaos theory: a tool for predicting the unpredictable”, Journal
of Business Forecasting, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 22-8.
Rosen, M. (1991), “Coming to terms with the field: understanding and doing organizational
ethnography”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 1-24.
Stacey, R. (1995), “The science of complexity: an alternative perspective for strategic change
processes”, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 16 No. 6, pp. 477-95.
Stuart, E. and Fuller, B. (1991), “Clothing as communication in two business-to-business sales
settings”, Journal of Business Research, Vol. 91 Nos. 2/3, pp. 269-90.
Thatchenkery, T. (1992), “Organizations as text: hermeneutics as a model for understanding
organizational change”, in Pasmore, W.A. and Woodman, R.W. (Eds), Research in
Organizational Change and Development, Vol. 6, JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, pp.197-233.
Thietart, R.A. and Forgues, B. (1995), “Chaos theory and organization”, Organization Science, Vol.
6 No. 1, pp. 19-31.
Thompson, J.D. (1967), Organizations in Action, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.
Van Maanen, J. (1988), Tales of the Field, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Victor, B. and Stephens, C. (1994), “The dark side of new organizational forms: an editorial essay”,
Organization Science, Vol. 5 No. 4, pp. 479-82.
Wattel, H.L. (1995), “The semiotic of communication. Interpreting symbolic consumer behaviour
in popular culture and works of art”, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Vol. 29, pp. 253-8.
Zald, M. (1993), “Organization studies as a scientific and humanistic enterprise: toward a
reconceptualization of the foundations of the field”, Organization Science, Vol. 4 No. 4,
pp. 513-28.