Cross-cultural management scholars sometimes aren’t the most up to date when it comes to theories in the wider social sciences. This isn’t simply when the most tenacious still hang on to Hofstede’s purported ‘paradigm’ of cultural dimensions – perhaps a reason why social scientists often do not take us management scholars seriously. Postcolonial theory has been coming under criticism for some time. Yet critical cross-cultural management scholars can still be seen clinging to an idea of postcolonialism that may now be past its due date.
I recently reviewed Vivek Chibber’s new book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn in International Journal of Cross Cultural Management. I had previously come across Chibber’s earlier work a decade ago when I read his 2013 book Postcolonial Theory and The Spector of Capital. Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University, was offering a useful, different analysis, suggesting that although postcolonial theory will be around for the foreseeable future, it is very much a child of its time. He was suggesting postcolonial theory largely rose to prominence as a consequence of the decline of the labour movement and the crushing of the Left in the 1970s. In the 1980s Marxism was no longer fashionable in critical academic circles. Any kind of prominent theory in academia that focused on capitalism, the working class, or class struggle was no longer current. So, postcolonial theory took its place as a radical theory focusing on oppression, but leaving out class struggle, and being developed in academia rather than from any bottom-up popular movement as was the case with the Marxist movement. It also was mainly kicked-started by a professor in English and comparative literature Edward Said developing colonial discourse theory, hence Chibber’s reference to the ‘cultural turn’ in his current book The Class Matrix. But also, in academic history circles, with subaltern studies leading the charge: the subject of Chibber’s criticisms in Postcolonial Theory and The Spector of Capitalism.
The value of postcolonial theory to cross-cultural management scholarship appears to be that it denies the universal application of western enlightenment thought to the non-West. This, for Chibber in his earlier book, included categories such as ‘capital’, ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘rationality’, and ‘objectivity’. Yet, he contended, this is based on a premise that capitalism has not universalized itself in the Third World. He proposed that Subaltern Studies assumes that the success of capital in the now developed world was the result of the bourgeoisie being able to form an alliance with the peasants and working classes against the feudal order, making the working class’s interest aligned with their own. In the colonial countries this did not happen. This alliance was not forged and indicates a failure to universalize capital.
Chibber asserted that this is fallacious. Firstly, the working class were not given democracy. This was won by struggles from below on the part of workers, farmers and peasants. Secondly, just because the introduction of capitalism into the colonies was different and did not include this alliance with the peasants and working class, does not mean that capital has not universalized. It may just mean that political cultures may be different. The rise of the liberal order was not an achievement of capitalists. As a result of misdescribing this in the West, they misdiagnose its failure in the East. In the East, they wrongly ascribe its failure to the shortcomings of the bourgeoisie.
Postcolonial theory, like any theory, is situated in time and place. Theory does not just drop out of the air. It is developed as a result of a particular power dynamic. The background to his new book The Class Matrix is Chibber’s prior assertion in his 2013 work that the intellectual space of postcolonial theory was created as a radical (yet perhaps politically harmless) theory (or theories) about the oppression (cultural or otherwise) of ‘the other’ as a result of the demise of the Left and the labour movement. Yet I would ask, what happens when, perhaps as a resistance to that oppression, the oppressed start not just to speak back (as postcolonial theorists such as Spivak would have it) but actually start becoming economically active on the world stage, and after supporting anti-colonial struggles in regions such as Africa? I’m thinking of China in this regard. Then we need to recognise that new theories need to emerge, albeit if situated again in time and space.
Things have moved on when, in his new book, Chibber goes to the next stage of the journey. What does social theory look like after the ‘cultural turn’ and now that capitalism is very much back on the agenda? And, I would add, critical cross-cultural management scholars need to keep up with these developments.
Chibber contends that not all social and economic life is reducible to culture. Not all choices can reflect interpretations of the world, rather than looking at the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Huge inequalities of wealth and power are now motivating critical scholars (although not necessarily in cross-cultural management studies) to look again at materialist lines of enquiry. But rather than going back to purely materialist explanations, Chibber argues that the making of meaning plays an important role in social agency, yet it is important to integrate the power of class structure and class formation. At the same time, he argues that aspects of class are also affected by cultural factors.
Chibber’s definition of ‘culture’ is somewhat different from mine. He says he is not referring to culture as to an ‘entire way of life’ (he cites Raymond Williams in this regard) including religion, ideology, the arts and literature, as well as all political and economic institutions. This is the meaning of culture I use, more in the tradition of British social anthropology (which is my undergraduate background). He uses it in the narrower sense (which I would say is more in the tradition of North America cultural anthropology) as denoting ideology, discourse, normative codes, or the interpretive dimension of social practices. He says that where readers agree more with the former sense of the word they can substitute ‘ideology’ or ‘discourse’. As he suggests, this facilitates his argument. It may be the case that accepting a wider interpretation of culture, social structure such as social and economic class could be subsumed within ‘culture’. Chibber chooses to keep ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as concepts apart, yet purports to bring them together in an argument to return to the materialist view of social class integrated with a cultural analysis. Capitalism is real, and it permeates every aspect of our cultural and social being. It is a material fact that its clearest defining aspect is a class structure that is typified by ‘those who control society’s productive assets and those who have none’ (p. 22).
For cross-cultural management scholars, who should be interested in social structures and the way they interact with culture, this is an important aspect often forgotten, even within the purview of critical scholars. It is Chibber’s argument in his earlier work, and the rationale for his current book, that in the ‘cultural turn’ (for example in postcolonialism that has captured the imagination of so many critical scholars in international and cross-cultural and management studies) the importance of class structure was quietly dropped from view. Hence in Jack and Westwood’s important 2009 critical book in this area, capitalism is mentioned briefly, but class structure not at all. The Class Matrix is Chibber’s contribution to bringing class and culture back together, perhaps in a post-Marxist, post-postcolonial era. Chibber argues that the class matrix, in particular the way it operates today, is fundamental to social theory.
Certainly, social structure (at least in post-industrial countries), and the world of work has changed significantly from when I was an undergraduate student in South Wales in the days of mining communities living close together, men emerging with blackened faces from the coal mines, strikes and picket lines. The predominance of service industries, insecure gig economies, individuals working from home, but the most severe economic inequalities existing in a century, does not mean that class structure no longer exists and can be ignored as a fundamental in how society and employment work.
In Chibber’s terms cultural changes towards more individualism in society and the workplace, and the breakdown of collective solidarity that in previous decades could be organised into oppositional labour movements is structurally led. Culture is secondary. Yet this comes back to the way you choose to define ‘culture’. If you defer from Chibber’s restrictive definition, akin to ‘ideology’, and take the position that it represents all that is human made, then surely the social and economic class structure falls within this definition. Yet in Chibber’s terms, this would bring us back to the ‘cultural’ view that Marx’s prediction of collective action against capitalism has failed because of ideological reasons: false consciousness. Rather, Chibber argues, people, as they have become more atomised and individualistic over the last half century, are well aware of the impositions of class structure (inequality, cost of living, insecure work) but are resigned to it, and only opposing it by individualist action (whether it be individual resistance in the workplace or individual advancement), and disengaging from any thoughts of collective action (decline of trade unions) or passive political action (declining voter turnout).
Does this mean we can forget about culture? Although Chibber indicates that we cannot just forget about the ‘cultural turn’ in critical social theory, and that in some ways this movement can be integrated with the need to place social structure in a primary position, his ultimate conclusion is that culture, language and identity are not more important than the class structure that shapes society. This does reflect the views of cross-cultural management scholars from Hofstede onwards, that collectivism is inversely associated with ‘modernisation’. That we should expect more individualism in modern service economies is not controversial in cross-cultural management studies. Yet in recent times, we have seen collective action by service workers, such as teachers and health workers, who (despite the fallout from the COVID pandemic and its inheritance) cannot work from home to any great extent. Moreover, the argument towards more atomisation in society does not hold so well in still heavily industrialised countries where coal mines and heavy industry and factories are still prominent.
But in a way, Chibber’s thesis does lean towards putting cross-cultural management scholars out of business, despite the promise of the book to somehow synthesise what is good from the ‘cultural turn’ and the materialist perspective. At the end of the day, Chibber maintains a dualist perspective of social issues, and comes down heavily on the side of materialism, having laid the foundation at the beginning of his book with his definition of culture. Moreover, he appears, through his assertion that structural class formations are primary, to forget about the cultural and does not include this at all. His definition of culture being too restrictive, which leads him to contrast the cultural with the material or structural.
This dualism is reflected in international management studies with the opposition between culturalists and institutionalist and too many cross-cultural scholars readily accepting Hofstede’s concept of ’software of the mind’, or citing Geertz, ignoring the materialists in America cultural anthropology such as Marvin Harris, or the British social anthropologists, among whom Jack Goody in 1992 tells us that the dichotomy between the cultural and the social is not readily accepted within the European tradition, stating ‘The Cultural, in other words, is the social viewed from another perspective, not a distinct analytical entity’ .
Chibber’s new book is important as it continues his argument for a more prominent consideration in contemporary social science of class structure, and the fundamental political and economic oppositions between capital and labour. This should be fundamental to management studies in considering the importance of power in both intraorganizional studies and international studies. It should help us to more clearly analyses interactions within the workplace. It should help us beyond postcolonial theories of ‘the other’ to understand the fundamentals of international interactions, of racism, of the role of migrants in society and the workplace.
Here I am not siding with Chibber on the primacy of materialism where, he says, that in the culturalist framework ‘ ideology serves as a cause of the structure’s stabilisation, in my argument, it is a consequence of that stabilisation’. (p.111). He contends that workers’ consent to the realities of capitalism is not ideology but the pressure of their circumstances. This appears to lead him to pessimistic conclusions. The ascendancy of right wing popularism, the lack of political vehicles – trade unions, left political parties, mass organisations of the left – as well as the overwhelming advantages of capital over labour.
For cross-cultural management scholars a clear understanding of what is meant by ‘culture’ is important. In my interpretation (let’s call it the ‘socio-cultural’ view), capitalism and the power dynamic that comes with it is human made. It is not a law of nature. This interpretation demands that this power structure is incorporated within the ambit of our scholarship. It is not separate (let’s leave it to the political economists!). Chibber’s 2013 book provided a clear pathway for critical cross-cultural management scholars to move past the historical moment of postcolonial theory, and to incorporate social structure in their analysis.
I am disappointed with The Class Matrix in resurrecting a dichotomous approach in moving past the ‘cultural turn’. This appears less than helpful in moving social science in the direction of integrating the cultural with the structural. It also helps to keep cross-cultural management scholarship in a silo, away from considerations of power, class, economic structure, politics, capital’s institutions. To me, it is difficult to study any facet of culture without incorporating these aspects within our field of study, to be involved in a contemporary development of social sciences, and to contribute to theory development in the wider body of social science scholarship.
© Terence Jackson 2024
Terence Jackson 