Jean-Paul Sartre’s enormous and often difficult Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960/2004) has largely been forgotten today. But the concepts it contains are worth reconsidering, particularly from an organization theory perspective. The book offers novel explanations of organizations, groups, institutions, power, resistance and technology that remain eminently relevant. I argue that a compelling and fruitful organization theory lurks in the Critique of Dialectical Reason with respect to (at least) three key topics: power/resistance, management hierarchies and technology. I outline the contours of this Sartrean organization theory and present implications and avenues for future inquiry.
Introduction
Published over sixty years ago, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la Raison Dialectique) (1960/2004) developed a highly original theory of organizations, groups, institutions, power, resistance and technology. Yet very little of it has featured in organization theory to date. The omission reflects a broader dearth of interest in Sartre’s scholarship in our field, which is surprising given how he was one of the 20th century’s most preeminent thinkers. I believe the lacuna is due to several factors.
First, Sartre is usually considered an existential phenomenologist, a moniker stemming from his groundbreaking philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943/1957). Phenomenology examines the immediacy of individual consciousness: colour perception, feelings and tactility. Sartre ingeniously blended this with dyadic interpersonal relationships in Being and Nothingness. Organizational scholars working within an ‘interpretive paradigm’ (Burrell & Morgan, 1979) have found it beneficial, with Sartre’s influence generally limited to that domain (e.g. see Costas & Fleming, 2009; Paulsen, 2017; Costas, 2013; Cunliffe, Luhman, & Boje, 2004).
Second, Sartre first made his name in literature, including plays and the bestseller Nausea (1938/1963). This likely stunted interest in his social philosophy in the formative years of organization theory, with German and American sociologists gaining more airtime. I would suggest this was probably more so in the United States which, apart from Max Weber (championed by Talcott Parsons), typically overlooked European social theory. In this context, avant-garde writers like Sartre would have seemed too exotic.
Third, from the late 1950s onwards, Sartre’s existentialism fell out of vogue and was superseded first by structuralism (e.g. Levi Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, etc.) and then post-structuralism (e.g. Derrida, Foucault, etc.). Organization theory’s postmodern turn – among critical scholars, at least – unconsciously replicated Foucault’s somewhat hasty rejection of Sartre’s philosophical humanism.
And fourth, although he was never a member of the French Communist Party, from the early 1950s onwards Sartre courted political controversy. He publicly supported communist Cuba and Mao Zedong, trenchantly opposed French colonialism and sympathized with the USSR (although less so after its 1956 invasion of Hungary). This militancy only grew as the philosopher aged. Sartre’s advocacy of revolutionary violence was especially off-putting to mainstream academia (Aron, 1975). More broadly, the Cold War profoundly shaped social science in this respect (Saunders, 2000; Solovey & Cravens, 2012) and no doubt organization theory too (Tadajewski, 2009).
If Sartre’s existential phenomenology makes only a marginal appearance in the annals of organization theory, then the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960/2004) – herein referred to as the Critique – is entirely absent apart from a passing note by Burrell and Morgan (1979). This too has several explanations.
First, the Critique is an attempt to combine existential phenomenology – as explicated in Being and Nothingness – with a more dynamic and sophisticated Marxism (Catalano, 1986; Sheridan, 1973). Sartre’s primary audiences were Marxist and communist intellectuals, whom he believed had misunderstood dialectical materialism. So, it is understandable why this esoteric debate might not appeal to organizational scholars, particularly today.
And second, the Critique is notoriously difficult to read. The text is prolix and often cryptic. Even the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson (2004, p. xiv) – whose own writing is not without its labyrinthine sentence constructions – laments the book’s ‘occasional unreadability’ in his 2004 forward to the Critique. The often-impenetrable prose is symptomatic of several underlying issues. Sartre is delving headlong into social ontology, which has a reputation for denseness, especially in the continental vein. Moreover, Sartre finished the book during an intense period of work under the influence of amphetamines. Corydrane could be purchased over the counter in 1950s France and the philosopher partook generously. Sartre’s biographer Annie Cohen-Solal (1985, p. 374) describes a typical day while the Critique was being written:
As soon he was up, after a heavy meal and just a few hours of bad sleep, artificially induced by four or five sleeping pills, he had a cup of coffee and some Corydrane: first one tablet, then two, then three, which he chewed, while working. By the end of the day, he had emptied the whole tube and produced thirty or forty pages of Sartre . . . This is how he wrote The Critique of Dialectical Reason: a wild rush of words and juxtaposed ideas, pouring forth during crises of hyperexcitement, under the influence of contradictory drugs, that would zing him up, knock him down, and halt him in between . . . up, down, stop in a constant struggle against himself, against his tired body, against time and sleep.
The 900-page French original was so chaotic that editors of the English translation imposed their own grid of chapters and subsections, relegating protracted digressions to the footnotes. Nor was the Critique meant to be read as a standalone text, which increases the confusion. It was actually the middle section of larger project. Sartre’s introduction to the book was published separately as Search for a Method (1957/1963). Making matters worse, Sartre considered Volume One of the Critique – our concern in this article – only a preparatory sketch of ideas that would be fully explained in Volume Two. Unfortunately, Volume Two was abandoned and never completed (notes were published posthumously [Sartre, 2006]). Hence why reading Volume One can sometimes feel like starting a film halfway through, disorientating and perplexing.
Notwithstanding these challenges, I suggest that a compelling and worthwhile organization theory lurks in the Critique. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the main contours of this Sartrean theory of organizations. It places agency, conflict and domination at the centre of inquiry, so is naturally situated in Critical Management Studies. But scholars working in other areas may also find value in Sartre’s analysis, particularly in relation to institutions, digital technology, social movements and cognate fields. The paper is structured as follows. First, I explain Sartre’s objectives for writing the Critique and outline its central argument. Next a Sartrean organization theory is developed in relation to three contemporary themes: power/resistance, management hierarchies and technology. Finally, the conclusion discusses implications and future research avenues for scholars wishing to advance this fascinating theoretical perspective.
Reading the Critique of Dialectical Reason
The overall structure of the Critique consists of an Introduction, Book 1 and Book 2. Let’s discuss the salient concepts as they appear in each part.
Praxis, practico-inert and counter-finalities
The Introduction explains the author’s primary objectives. By the time Sartre began work on the Critique, he had discovered Marxism and its broad sociological canvas: ‘I consider Marxism to be the unsurpassable philosophy of our time’ (Sartre, 1957/1963, p. xxxiv).
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But Sartre didn’t want to simply jettison existentialism and its emphasis on individual agency. Nor was he happy with Marxian orthodoxy, particularly its pitch towards mechanical determinism and party bureaucracy. To clarify the problem, Sartre quotes Marx’s classic dictum in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852/1978, p. 595):
Men (sic) make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
According to Sartre, mainstream Marxism had forgotten the dialectical interplay between agency and structure, favouring ‘circumstances already existing’ over people making their own histories. It had become boringly determinist as a result. And while some Marxists celebrated the working class as a harbinger of revolutionary change, Sartre disagreed. As he observed its development in France, the working class was merely a sociological category or passive collective – like strangers waiting for a bus or shoppers in a supermarket. Collectives are an impoverished type of unity consisting of isolated individuals, each pursuing his or her own interests. They cannot work together to overcome ‘circumstances already given’. What Sartre calls the practico-inert structures their collective behaviour. This term literally means ‘impotent action’ or ‘inactive practice’ and arises from the false naturalization of prevailing institutions.
One motivation Sartre had for writing the Critique was to rescue agency, echoing existentialism’s approbation of individual freedom and choice. He does this by intersecting two ideas. First is Marx’s notion of praxis or reflective action. It explains how people make their own history by negating, sublating and then transcending ‘circumstances already existing’ as creative agents. Praxis is about transforming who one is, including the sociomaterial conditions that define this, something Marx (after Hegel) believed was a unique human capacity. Negation implies conflict. Having surveyed countless cases of social transformation – and this is the second idea – Sartre identifies the fused group as the most incendiary expression of pure praxis. These groups begin small, without hierarchy or party structure and fundamentally reject the practico-inert. Their fusion (‘all for one and one for all’) is the source of tremendous energy. It is at this level, Sartre contends, that social movements and revolutions begin.
Sartre does not seek to romanticize any of this, however. Fused groups may never emerge, even when conditions are grimly unjust. Why is this? One answer lies in the political economy of the technology or ‘tools’ we use. For Sartre, individual praxis always seeks to totalize itself.
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This occurs when a subject fully connects with his or her intended object (or final goal). For example, an architect first imagines an end state or ‘finality’, say, a pioneering new social housing complex to alleviate homelessness in her city. She then draws on the required expertise, tools and material infrastructure to try and realize a unity between concept and finality.
Technology amplifies that ability greatly, but also introduces a hitch. Finalization is often foiled by counter-finalities within the collective. These are unintended consequences produced by the practico-inert that lock us into passive forms of life. For example, to survive in a crowded marketplace, our architect is forced to adopt awful industry-standard software. Her employer insists on it, since it will speed up the design process and emulate successful competitors (or the collective). Not only is the software costly and rife with bugs, it seriously limits her aesthetic vision. If she opts for an alternative modelling tool, several big clients may leave and her employer will be furious. In the end, she capitulates to the collective and finds herself designing grey multi-story car park buildings instead. A serious issue arises here, according to Sartre. When using this inferior technology, our architect is simultaneously shaped by it, diminishing her creative capacities in significant ways. Counter-finalities are dangerous for this reason, a topic I will return to soon.
Collectives and seriality
The final chapter of Book 1 of the Critique delves deeper into collective structures to understand how they impede dissent and the formation of fused groups. As noted earlier, Sartre describes collectives as a sociological category. They are objectively uniform (e.g. a socio-economic class, everyone travelling on a train, drivers for a ridesharing company, etc.), but have no sense of solidarity. Individuals are isolated and motivated by self-interest. Because of this, according to Sartre, collectives cannot act in concert, even during a major crisis (think here of panic buying amid the Covid-19 pandemic and its counter-finalities, including toilet paper shortages).
Collectives are regulated by serialization. We can think of this as an ordinal series or sequence (1, 2, 3, etc.). The units are discrete, abstract and interchangeable. Seriality is an empty form of sociality. Sartre uses the analogy of commuters queuing for a bus. The practico-inert is the public transport system, including the vehicle, employed drivers, standardized timetabling, ticketing system and the orderly queue as passengers wait to board. The people gathered form a series (passenger 1, 2, 3, etc.). Their aim is to get to work on time, something shared by all passengers, but not as a reciprocal mission. I do not worry about another passenger’s trip nor do they about mine: ‘the acts of waiting are a communal fact, but are lived separately as identical instances the same act’ (Critique, p. 262). When isolated in this fashion, ironically, individuality all but disappears. Each passenger is interchangeable with everyone else. Furthermore, fellow passengers are for me an alterity, an objectified ‘Other’ as I am for them: ‘The Other is me in every Other and every Other in me and everyone as Other in all Others’ (Critique, pp. 266–7). And because I also take on the gaze of the Other to understand myself, an internal alterity (or sense of self-alienation) results. Sartre calls this the ‘interiorization of his common-being-outside-oneself-in-the-other’ (Critique, p. 268).
Central here is scarcity. I simply must get to work on time, otherwise my income will be jeopardized. But perhaps there are not enough seats on the bus and I have to compete for a place. If I decide to resist the series and leave the queue to complain, another passenger will simply take my place and I will be late for work. As such, there are no organic relations of solidarity among the passengers. We cannot band together to achieve anything beyond our own self-interest. Within a series, resistance seems futile.
Sartre explores other cases of serialization, including radio broadcasts and mass media. However, those regulating our access to scarce resources are the most powerful. Paid employment is frequently mentioned in this regard. Like most adults, I must participate in the labour market in order to earn a living. It is an exigency that cannot be ignored. Others are competing for jobs too. Even after gaining employment, I know there’s always someone else waiting in the wings who could potentially replace me. This private anxiety inflicts all who are interchangeable in the employment series. The external unity of the impersonal collective has been transfigured into an interiorized alterity or self-alienation. I become Other to myself and thus rendered powerless.
Matters are more complex, however. If serial self-alienation is a precondition for objectifying myself in the labour market, then the same also applies when I am paid to objectify others, including customers, clients, students and so on. Pre-empting Hochschild’s (1983) famous study of emotional labour by almost quarter of a century, Sartre examines service work from this perspective:
The customer (as a serial object) must be manipulated as a complex apparatus according to certain methods based on certain laws (which are also serial). But in order to manipulate his (sic) customers, the employee must first learn to manipulate himself (change his mood, put the customer in the right, etc.): one must manipulate oneself in order to manipulate others. (Critique, p. 669, emphasis original)
Where does this collective serialization spring from? At one level, it is a corollary of mass society and its rationalization. Modernity is conspicuously peopled by strangers, as Simmel (1908/1972) famously observed. On another level though, Sartre suggests that dominant institutions encourage seriality due to its regulatory advantages. It makes resisting power very difficult. If I depart the series in frustration, I simply forego my place to someone else: ‘This purely individual action changes nothing . . . I will have merely rushed into the ineffective, abstract isolation of private life, objectively changing nothing; I will have negated myself as an individual member of the gathering’ (Critique, p. 272). As a result, most keep quiet and carry on. Large-scale series have yet another disconcerting feature. They are experienced as infinite, according to Sartre. By this he means indefinite and not easily bracketed. As a member of a tiny commuting series, perhaps there is a chance I can organize passengers into a protest group to lower ticket prices. But all transport users in the city? Or the entire labour market? One cannot see where the series begins and ends. Individual isolation thus feels universal. Once again, resistance is futile.
Fused groups against serialization
Now the story gets interesting. History is in fact replete with resistance, radical ruptures and insurrection, even under conditions of deep serialization. Book 2 returns to fused groups to explain this. As previously mentioned, fused groups begin as small social units that break away from the series. Even if moderately successful, they can evolve into what Sartre calls organizations. Herein lies a problem, according to Sartre. Organizations – and the vibrant praxis that animate them – are frequently corrupted. This is especially so if they ossify into new dominant collectives or what Sartre terms institutions. The philosopher’s anti-utopian attitude is evident here. There are few guarantees that social revolt will end well. The French Revolution descending into the Reign of Terror and the Russian Revolution producing Stalinism are examples discussed at length in the Critique.
How do fused groups form in the first place given the countervailing pressures mentioned earlier? There is no formula for predicting this, Sartre insists. Every situation is different with its unique contextual variables. But some factors seem important. For example, fused groups never crystallize in a vacuum but in contradistinction to the series being negated. As Sartre puts it,
the group constitutes itself as a negation of the collective which engenders and sustains it . . . the group is defined by its constant movement of integration which tends to turn it into pure praxis by trying to eliminate all forms of inertia from it. (Critique, p. 255)
In other words, fused groups are ‘born to dissolve series in the living synthesis of a community’ (Critique, p. 668). Furthermore, the formation of fused groups is more likely in crisis situations, especially when life is pushed to the brink and conditions feel intolerable: ‘there has to be a conjunction of historical circumstances, a definite change in the situation, the danger of death, violence’ (Critique, p. 401). Sartre closely examines the French Revolution with this in mind. When the Parisian uprising began, it was still safer to stay in the series and ignore calls to ransack the city. The fear of being replaced in the series was too strong. At some point, however, perceptions changed. Survival could be better secured by joining the breakaway partisans and storming the Bastille rather than remaining in the series. Sartre is ambivalent on this issue, however. One can never really predict if a fused group will materialize because it isn’t a mechanical process. There is no ‘calculus of protest’. The French Revolution could just as easily be interpreted as a chance event in this sense. We will return to this problem in the next section.
How are fused groups structured? Three notable features stand out. First, whereas greater numbers in a series work against me and reduce my ability to act otherwise, the opposite occurs in fused groups: ‘to be more numerous is to be more powerful’ (Critique, p. 378). My freedom is expanded by more people. Second, Sartre rejects concepts like ‘collective consciousness’ or ‘group mind’. The idea that the ‘whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ too easily demotes individual agency. Instead, each group member acts as a mediating third party to a binary relationship. He or she contextualize other dyadic exchanges, permitting a uniting ‘we’ (via ternary relations) to manifest without undercutting anyone’s individuality. For example, ‘a newcomer joins a group of 100 through me insofar as the group which I join will have 100 through him . . . put another way, each of us is the 100th of the Other’ (Critique, p. 375). And third, authority is fused within the group. All individuals may issue orders (in an act of transcendence or ‘quasi-sovereignty’) and receive them too (in an act of ‘immanence’, returning to the rank-and-file). Because the third-party-mediator annuls the need for an overarching hierarchy, each individual expresses his or her freedom via the freedom of everyone else (also see Rae, 2011; Doran, 2013).
Organizations and institutions
Fused groups may at this stage fizzle out, fail or be overwhelmed by another serializing institution. If it manages to survive, however, a degree of formalization will be required. Sartre calls this a ‘statuary group’. From here, organizations may develop: ‘organization refers both to the internal action by which a group defines its structures and to the group itself as a structured activity in the practical field’ (Critique, p. 446). Sartre mainly speaks of organized groups for good reason. As avatars of a founding fusion, they are still mediated by a common praxis. Sartre is keen to demonstrate that – as opposed to inert institutions, which we will discuss soon – organizations retain the organic vitalism of fused groups and yet adhere to formalist precepts. In other words, organizations are both fused and formal.
The point calls for clarification given the enduring view that, ‘who says organization, says oligarchy’ (Michels, 1915/1962, p. 365). Revealing his anarcho-syndicalist leanings, Sartre refuses to see bureaucratic centralization as some ‘iron law’ of organizing. If anything, top-down hierarchies (not to mention managerialism) are an aberration. To demonstrate why, Sartre instructs the reader – over many pages – on how organized groups function without hierarchy. For example, roles are not externally determined, rationalized or imposed upon workers. Rather, ‘function is a positive definition of the common individual . . . it is a determination of individual praxis’ (Critique, p. 449). Furthermore, there are no divergent interests between managers/employees, employers/labour and so forth. Accordingly, individual freedom is expressed not against or around organizational structure but organically through it:
The only direct and specific action of the organized group, therefore, is its organization and perpetual reorganization, in other words, its actions on its members. By this, of course, I mean that common individuals settle the internal structures of the community rather than that the group-in-itself imposes them as categories. (Critique, p. 463)
Individuality (as opposed to individualism) is never sacrificed to the system or a higher cause in fused organizations. It instead gains extended powers and capacities through others. Hence why ‘there is no difference between rights and duties’ (Critique, p. 450) or what is voluntarily chosen and necessitated by exigencies. In this manner,
a temporary balance is established between the common individual as a social product and organic freedom as the adoption of his individual-power and as the free execution of the common task with the common means. (Critique, p. 600)
Is organizational size a limiting factor here? Conventional organization theory – stretching back to Weber (1921/1978), Blau (1968, 1970), Blau and Schoenherr (1971), Pugh, Hickson, Hinings and Turner (1968) and Woodward (1970) – assumes that increased scale (or quantity of participants) automatically necessitates a qualitative shift towards centralization, stratification and worker alienation. Big organizations need big bureaucracies and big bosses. The Critique disagrees. Large organizations can still facilitate fused praxis without reverting to institutionalization or the practico-inert. As long as they remain a voluntary expression of a shared finality, then fusion is not contingent on size. Think here of the Mondragon workers’ cooperative in Spain with over 80,000 members. This is no anomaly. Anthropologists have conclusively demonstrated that large anti-hierarchical organizations – even entire cities – have thrived throughout history (Clastres, 1990; Graeber & Wengrow, 2021).
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Sartre finally turns to institutions and develops an idiosyncratic perspective that differs markedly from how they are generally approached in organization studies (i.e. neo-institutional theory, etc.). He calls institutions failed organizations. Why so? As soon as power – which is a synonym for the practical freedom to act, according to Sartre – is concentrated and/or centralized in a social formation, its members are converted into objects of instrumentalization. Fused organizations cease to exist at that point. Only in institutions, according to Sartre, do impersonal authority relations appear because ‘everyone’s shifting quasi-sovereignty is immobilized and becomes authority as a specific relation of one individual over all others’ (Critique, p. 608). Authority is always established by some kind of social separation, be it economic, symbolic or political. The false unity that institutions display, then, is simply the attempt to freeze those divisions in place:
Authority does not emerge in its full development except at the level of institutions: institutions, that is to say, a rebirth of seriality and impotence, are necessary for the consecration of power and ensuring its de jure permanence, authority necessarily depends of inertia and seriality . . . the institutional system presents itself, by a permanent mystification, in its inorganic-being as the real unity of the declining group. (Critique, p. 608, emphasis original)
As Sartre reiterates, top-down administrative hierarchies are never normal. Few people would choose to be part of them. And there are no functional reasons for their presence. Just look at the dysfunctions they consistently produce. Instead, technocracy is symptom that something has gone very wrong. How could we think otherwise, Sartre insists. What were once cooperative, creative and fulfilled human beings are now serialized in a cold mechanism and severed from the means of self-determination.
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Towards a Sartrean Organization Theory
Building on the above analysis, we can now outline the contours of a distinct Sartrean organization theory. Three observations and key themes, I propose, are suggestive of such an approach to organizational analysis. They are by no means exhaustive, of course, but provide a useful starting point and can be summarized as follows:
Observation 1: Serialization is one of the most powerful modes of regulation in modern life. It is a type of unity that disables solidarity, enlisting self-interest and isolation to manage actors instead. Opposing serialization is thus extremely difficult. However, the formation of fused groups can be an effective countermeasure and thus studied as a strategy of resistance accordingly. Key theme: power and resistance.
Observation 2: Top-down management hierarchies are not synonymous with organization. Only ossified institutions resort to command structures. That most organizations do not adopt cooperative and egalitarian power sharing arrangements is a matter of choice rather than necessity. Ironically, it is a choice that most members of an organization never get to make. Key theme: management hierarchies.
Observation 3: Organized groups unify and realize the finalities of individual praxis due to their participatory structures. By comparison, institutional collectives frequently produce counter-finalities that are amplified through modern technology. Tools turn on their individual users, transforming them into ‘the machine’s machine’ (Critique, p. 90). In the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), this observation can be summarized as follows: robots probably won’t steal your job but they will fundamentally alter you who are . . . for the worse. Key theme: technology.
Let us now unpack each observation/theme to gain a better understanding of what a Sartrean organization theory adds to current knowledge.
Observation 1: Power and resistance
Power and resistance have been much discussed in organization theory. The Critique offers a number of fresh insights on this topic. Take the notion of serialization, for example. As an expression of institutional power, a series coordinates action by depersonalizing, standardizing and atomizing individuals in a collective gathering. Paradoxically, this entails a kind of anti-social sociality because its unity is simultaneously isolating. Labour-based digital platforms operating in the gig economy are a good contemporary example. When an Uber driver enters the series, they are individuated as an interchangeable integer. The series deploys an anonymous k-means clustering algorithm to unify the collective. Unlike the bus queue, where all members are physically present, Sartre would call the Uber workforce an ‘indirect gathering’: ‘I define such gatherings by absence; by which I mean not so much absolute distance . . . as the impossibility of individuals establishing relations of reciprocity between themselves or common praxis’ (Critique, pp. 270–1). Drivers experience the series as infinite in the Sartrean sense, with a global pool of 5 million workers (Iqbal, 2022). If any withdraw in protest, very little changes (bar their income) and another driver replaces them. Opposition seems pointless.
Resisting a series is supposed to be tough according to Sartre. In the case of Uber, the digital architecture is designed with this in mind, complementing the company’s hostility to labour unions (Stewart & Stanford, 2017). As for forming a fused group, who is willing to leave the series first and risk losing their gig? There are no guarantees other drivers will follow in solidarity. And what if the company retaliates? As Sartre remarks, perhaps my act of defiance
will be deformed and diverted, and there is a danger what it will bring about results quite contrary to those I intended. It may be turned against me to destroy me. And this very concrete reason always tends to plunge me into even deeper silence. (Critique, p. 601)
This is certainly one reason for the lack of open dissent in the gig economy today (see Walker, Fleming, & Berti, 2021).
Having said that, serialization can be resisted, even successfully so. Ridesharing drivers do establish alt-labour unions and win class actions against their de facto employers. Eco-campaigners do challenge serialized consumption patterns and have harmful products outlawed. Recall that the Critique aims to mark the importance of agency, change and transformation. Even the most lapidified ‘circumstances existing already’ were once fashioned by people, sometimes from very different prior conditions. For Sartre, the fused group expresses this capacity in its most compelling form. But how do these groups emerge in the first place? We have already noted that the Critique is inconclusive on this point. Fused groups are an explosive force because they often come out of nowhere. By the same token, I think we can identify at least four factors that are present in the formation process:
Actors must perceive the situation as unbearable, be that ethically, economically or even physically. They simply cannot go on like this. As a result, anything is better than remaining in the series. The perception is socially constructed, of course, and not triggered by any ontological threshold of privation.
The perception is shared by more than one individual.
The situation calls for a major existential decision. The word ‘crisis’ is rooted in the Ancient Greek term kairos, meaning those rare moments when a lifechanging choice must be made. We cannot anticipate the outcome of that decision. In her influential differentiation between ‘decaf resistance’ and ‘real resistance’, Contu (2008) argues that the latter carries a massive cost. In making this impossible choice one steps into the unknown.
A social apparatus of communication is present to facilitate fusion. Meetings, secret pamphlets and codes are common examples. The use of social media in recent uprisings – like the ‘Arab Spring’ – also underscores this point, although some have questioned its effectiveness and durability (Seymour, 2019; Beckerman, 2022).
This raises a thorny question. We assume that these fused groups will be left-wing freedom fighters like Sartre on the barricades. But could they not also be extreme right-wing hatemongers, like those who attacked the US Capitol in January 2021, or radical anti-vaxxers? For sure, so much critical organizational inquiry assumes that only the ‘good guys’ resist, which is obviously problematic. Related fields like social movement theory have the same problem.
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Here Sartre’s theory of fused groups is useful. It might be argued that its structural qualities (i.e. the lack of fixed membership, hierarchies and authoritarian rituals) are intrinsically aligned with social democratic politics. Whereas right-wing political movements, by comparison, have limited capacity for such Sartrean fusion: they are either (a) ultra-individualistic, lone wolves working without organization; (b) an opportunistic mob incited by powerful (and often invisible) funders; or they may (c) adopt the trappings of mini-institutions from the start, replete with ‘leaders’, party bureaucracy, discipline and strict membership linked to race, nationality and ethnicity. Fused groups on the other hand – as Ross (2016) demonstrates in her brilliant study of the Paris commune – actively reject all of those characteristics.
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Observation 2: Management hierarchies
That the Critique displays an antipathy towards institutions, formal authority and administrative hierarchies is something of an understatement. Concerning institutions, for example, Sartre repeatedly rebuts the idea that they are desirable and/or inevitable in mass (post)industrial society. Institutions represent the decay of vibrant organizations and a return to serialization: ‘We have seen institutionalization as petrified practice’ (p. 669). It is worth noting that Sartre’s real target – given his anarchist proclivities – is probably the nation-state and the mega-corporations that have mushroomed around it. Although he approaches the concept in a very different way compared to contemporary institutional theory, organizational scholars working in this area will find Sartre’s observations fascinating nevertheless. This is particularly so in relation to agency and change that the Critique constantly counterposes to the institutionalization process.
Relatedly, Sartre’s views on bureaucratic authority have important implications for studying management and its ideological offshoot, managerialism. Given how entrenched technocratic hierarchies are today, it is easy to take them for granted, including the coercive and non-participatory variants now pervading the employment sector (Anderson, 2017). Sartre’s counterargument is stimulating. By denaturalizing top-down hierarchies and calling them ‘abnormal’, the Critique helps dispel several ingrained myths. They can be itemized as follows:
‘Size and complexity ineluctably demand bureaucratic chains of command’. Untrue. As the research of Graeber and Wengrow (2021) among others indicates, scale is not a sufficient condition for administrative authority or managerialism.
‘Organizations of all shapes and sizes require “leadership” and a “strategic executive” to govern effectively.’ Untrue. Organizations can function perfectly well as self-governing systems, employing cooperative principles that eschew centralized power structures.
‘We need administrative hierarchies to efficiently coordinate complex tasks, allocate resources effectively and reduce waste.’ Untrue. A rich tradition of organizational inquiry reveals the opposite – employers impose management hierarchies even if it means making organizations less efficient and more wasteful (Fleming, 2014; Orr, 1996; Zuboff, 1989). Hence reports from workers complaining that managerialism thwarts their ability to work well, not enhance it (Gregg, 2013; Hanlon, 2015).
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‘Whoever says capitalism says management hierarchies.’ Partially true according historical research (Edwards, 1979; Gordon, 1996; Marglin, 1974). However, it omits the numerous varieties of capitalism, some of which have endorsed industrial democracy in the past, including workers councils and co-ownership (Ostrom, 1990; Paranque & Willmott, 2014). It seems to be neoliberal capitalism more specifically that despises cooperative employment systems (Dardot & Laval, 2013; Wolff, 2012).
Sartre clearly favours a highly syndicalist mode of (self) organizing. For him it allows individual praxis to flourish and counteracts that abiding hallmark of industrialization, human estrangement. Such self-governance would entail
free communized praxis . . . the project of removing man from the statue of alterity, which makes him a product of his product, in order to transform him . . . into a product of the group, that is to say, as long as the group is freedom – into his own product. (Critique, pp. 672–3, emphasis original)
The exposition is interesting for several reasons. First, Sartre had little time for revolutionary idealism or utopian big talk. His call for ‘free communized praxis’ reflects a grasp of the realistic options available, especially in light of the historical record. Scholars working on ‘alternative organizational forms’ make the same point (Parker, Cheney, Fournier, & Land, 2013, 2014). For sure, that organizations today could realistically approximate these Sartrean principles reveals just how unfree most employment situations are. As Gorz (1989) and Anderson (2017) similarly remind us, the arbitrary and often unaccountable powers that employers enjoy over their workforce ought to be a public scandal. But with few alternatives or exit opportunities available, most resign themselves to it as a fact of life. Sartre rails against this fallacy of misplaced concreteness, both in theory and practice. Defetishizing the faux necessity of paid employment – where daily subservience and objectification are considered indubitable – is a crucial task for Sartrean organization theory. Second, organizations based on ‘free communized praxis’ shouldn’t be romanticized as power-free zones. Power circulates here too, only in a more molecular and participatory manner. And third, Sartre’s fused organizations are far from infallible. The Critique is clear on this point, cataloguing the failures in depressing detail. But at least someone tried. And if they had not – and this is equally important – many of the progressive achievements we now take for granted would not exist. Sartre’s existentialism is adamant here. Existence means owning up to our freedom. Otherwise it wilts. Nowhere is this more evident than in our economic institutions. The Critique offers a convincing vocabulary for adumbrating an alternative future in this domain, one where hell might no longer be other people.
Observation 3: Technology
Technology has long been a major theme in organization theory, of course. And like much research in this area, Sartre too rejects technological determinism by foregrounding its socio-political surroundings. But the specifically Sartrean flavour we can glean from the Critique is its pessimistic, almost ‘tragic’ conclusions on this theme. While emblematic of enlightened progress, technology has a dark side, particularly the counter-finalities it conspires. The ‘tools’ Sartre has in mind look somewhat dated today, but his observations apply just as well to advanced computerization.
For Sartre, tool-based technical innovations are designed to improve our existence. Once institutionalized, however, technology can become an end in itself, acquiring independent powers that produce finalities not of our own making. As we use them, machines begin using us. What Sartre calls becoming ‘a thing man’ (Critique, p. 90) is where users are objectified by their tools and consequently objectify themselves too: ‘man becomes the machine’s machine: and to himself he is his own exteriority’ (Critique, p. 90). For example, automobiles were invented to improve mobility and transport. Compared to the horse and cart, steam engine or river boat, cars are a great leap forward. Among other things, they dramatically shorten the distance between home and work (our projected finality). Yet in many large metropolises, commuters find themselves stuck in endless traffic jams and poisoned by pollution (counter-finality). Individual praxis cannot be totalized and the collective is (literally, in this case) inert.
At first this appears like a classic ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem caused by too many self-interested actors overcrowding a finite domain. But counter-finalities are not only born from natural limits, which is why the connection with technology is important to note. Consider office email, for example. As Newport (2016) points out, IBM was one of the first companies to establish an ‘intranet’ to help transfer large files between departments. However, counter-finalities appeared almost from the outset: within weeks of its first use the corporate mainframe crashed. It turned out that workers had started using email for all communication. Today, as many employees attest, it’s become something of a minor tyranny, a ‘digital leash’ that takes much more than it gives (Freeman, 2009; Newport, 2021; Mazmanian, Orlikowski, & Yates, 2013). The anxiety consists of a weird Sartrean antinomy, however: it’s difficult to imagine what knowledge work (including academia) was like before office email. No doubt, impossibly slow, sluggish and clunky. Life with it, though, has become impossible too, only on another register.
The Critique helps explain what has happened. The original purpose of email – easing the difficulties of interpersonal interaction across spatial distances – enters a substratum of multiple and overlapping finalities framed by the practico-inert: employers and their quest to intensify labour; co-workers and customers demanding instantaneous contact; suppliers running to tight schedules; managers allaying their angst by compulsively issuing requests after hours, and so on. Digital technology partially serves all these finalities but ultimately undermines the master-finality behind the tool’s original purpose (i.e. to make our working lives less laborious). We begin to serve its needs. Unfortunately, the needs of digital systems are literally interminable and can never be satisfied (Han, 2017). After writing thousands of emails, cognitive workers are painfully aware that one more is always awaiting attention.
The reification of technology is not a new argument. But what Sartre says about the ‘thingification’ of users gives it an interesting twist. This centres on self-alienation. When hardened into a practico-inert, our tools transform us into their tools or at least human replicas of them. None of this would matter if people were not highly self-conscious beings. Because we are, ennui enters the picture. When tools shape us into their image, the malformation is registered by its user. We become Other to ourselves. Returning to our earlier example of the architect, her praxis is stymied by the substandard software in use. And soon she begins to serve it, suppressing her curiosity in order to satisfy its colourless sequencing protocols. And she knows it. In Sartre’s words, the disjunction between worker and machine is mirrored by an internal estrangement or ‘interiorized alterity’ that is self-aware. This raises some interesting avenues for future research, which I discuss in the concluding section.
Conclusions
A Sartrean organization theory opens a number of exciting future research areas. In terms of observation 1 – power/resistance – the concept of serialization adds an unexplored dimension to current frameworks, especially in digitalized settings punctuated by AI and machine learning. Serialization turns on the fear of being replaced, that one’s position can always be occupied by another. Today, however, that anxiety is netted within an endless algorithmic circuit, reflecting the classic transition from decimal code to sequenced binary operations. What we might term the ‘cipherization’ of labour – the recasting of workers as bit-variables within a Boolean binary system – redoubles the disenfranchizing effects of mass replaceability. A Sartrean organization theory invites us to examine its consequences further.
Observation 1 has implications for how we study organizational resistance too. We need to move beyond a Newtonian theory of conflict, where ‘every primary action has an equal and opposite reaction’. For Sartre, that is too mechanical. Resistance can appear when we least expect it. Or not at all when it seems imminent. The Critique emphasizes the existential features of opposition to account for this indeterminacy. When the stakes are high, saying ‘no’ often involves a unique and impossible choice (i.e. kairos). All might be lost. Whether that choice is ultimately made cannot be known in advance, even by the actors themselves. In any case, this existential risk and urgency has been missing in recent research, with ‘low-cost’ forms of rebellion being analytically preferred (e.g. hidden transcripts, micro-resistance, routine resistance, infra-politics, etc.). In addition, social movements theory may benefit from these insights, especially with respect to the unpredictable appearance of some organizations and the internal tensions that can manifest when movements evolve into mature institutions, prioritizing ‘collective identity’ over individual praxis (Melluci, 1989, 1996).
Observation 2 – management hierarchies – strikes at the heart of much of our research and has significant potential for future inquiry. By completely denaturalizing hierarchies, managerialism and authority, Sartrean organization theory unsettles many assumptions about their supposed inevitability. The Critique not only provides a refreshing counterargument, but presses us to think about what an egalitarian and ‘manager-less’ organization might look like. This requires a normative mode of analysis, which has generally been avoided in our discipline (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022). That is a shame. So many talented scholars in our community could be directing their attention to designing better organizational models, including (but not exclusively) user, worker, multi-stakeholder and platform cooperatives. After the tremendous problems it has caused, that the private business firm remains the conceptual horizon for so much scholarship today is regrettable.
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Observation 3 – technology – emphasizes the hidden economy between technological counter-finalities and subjective experience in contemporary employment settings. Recall that counter-finalities are not simply about personal goals (or praxis) being denied by collective processes. A Sartrean organization theory asks what this machine-saturated environment does to people’s ontological capacity to learn, emote, create, play and so on. For Sartre, our repeated attempt to be human – perhaps the baseline finality preceding all others – is persistently sabotaged by the tools we use; they end up shaping us instead. We can study the effects of ‘second wave’ AI in organizations from this standpoint, including neural nets, synthetic computational systems and deep machine learning. The prospect of being replaced by smart machines is certainly troubling. But so is the idea of being remoulded into their image. As quantum engineers attempt to simulate what they presume is human-like intelligence in machines, a banal and reductionist template of humanity is produced. After all, leading firms in this area – Veritone, Osaro, CCC, let alone Amazon – have no clue about what it means to be human. Subsequently, their model is projected back onto us as a regulatory value. The plan was for AI to mimic people. But the reverse occurs. And unfortunately, even ‘second wave’ AI is not so smart (Crawford, 2021; Pasquale, 2020; Smith, 2019). Sartrean organization theory encourages us to explore the self-alienating effects of the computronium and contemplate the Critique’s presentiment that man will soon be the machine’s machine.
That this self-Othering is a malfunction of subjectivity implies that philosophical humanism is at play in the Critique, albeit a very complicated one. Therefore, if a Sartrean organization theory differs from arguments about robotic substitution – since plenty of toiling humans are needed in the digital economic matrix – then it should not be confused with theoretical ‘posthumanism’ in recent studies of AI connectivism. The problem is not that our humanity has been morphologically dispersed by advanced multi-agent systems and thus (for better or worse) transcended, but the very opposite. A diminished and truncated ideogram of ‘humanness’ has infiltrated our existential field, forestalling the irreducible and non-algorithmic openness of social praxis. In its monochromatic image, machine rule forces us to recognize ourselves. This criticism is not delivered in the spirit of Ludditism. Modern technology is truly wonderous, Sartre avers. The concomitant horrors it exacts must instead be traced back to the relations of economic (un)reason that enframe it. Whether any liberatory disentanglement is possible remains to be seen. It is difficult to be optimistic, however. The Critique warns that the dark machine age we have entered is problematic not simply due to its violence and surveillance, but the calcification of ex-sistere itself.
At any rate, how we utilize Sartre’s organization theory will invariably be framed by the philosopher’s political imperatives when writing the Critique. What strikes the contemporary reader of the book is its uncompromising stance against authoritarianism in all its forms. This unrelenting criticality is evident on almost every page. It betrays a refusal to dilute – even slightly – the author’s ethico-political commitments. For sure, by the time the Critique appeared in 1960, Sartre was widely recognized as a far-left militant who openly advocated violent insurgency. That same year Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were hosted by Fidel Castro in Havana and the FBI’s file on the philosopher grew. Sartre famously rejected the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, even though the sizeable cash award was desperately needed: ‘I do not wish to be institutionalized in either East or West,’ he informed the committee (Sartre, 1964). And while May 1968 saw rebelling students repudiate many prominent leftist intellectuals for being hypocritical (including Adorno, Horkheimer, Althusser, etc.), not so Sartre. He joined the rioting students and was arrested for civil disobedience. In 1970 the aging philosopher was arrested again for peddling an outlawed Maoist newspaper – La Cause du Peuple – on the streets of Paris.
All of this is important to keep in mind when probing the Critique for concepts. For instance, we cannot use ideas like the fused group or seriality without including Sartre’s problematization of late capitalism, racism, colonialism/imperialism and autocracy. Concept and politics are indissolubly bound. Furthermore, Sartre presents a thoroughgoing crisis-based interpretation of history, organizations and society. There are no ‘normal times’ in the Critique, no default equilibrium or peaceable pluralism. It depicts a state of emergency that has been regularized. For Sartre, the world is in ruins everywhere we look . . . but only if we know how to look. This is no speculative catastrophism but a method of sorts, one that may provide a route out. As Gorz (1966, p. 52) said about the book’s core message a few years after its publication, ‘Sartre’s enterprise is to give himself (and us) the instruments of dialectical understanding, and thereby the means to pose the question of the possibility of suppressing the inhuman in human history, and of the eventual conditions of its suppressibility.’ The Critique is therefore an ambitious project, one that Sartre has great hope in yet understands will probably fail.
