Business miracles

Abstract

Drawing on the concepts of the miraculous in theology and philosophy, this paper makes a distinction between transcendent miracles, human miracles, and immanent miracles. The first find their origin in a deity that resides above our world, the second arise from the interactions of people, and the third emerge from an earth that constantly reinvents itself against its own laws. The paper starts off by showing how these three concepts of the miraculous manifest themselves in business literature on creativity and innovation. Next, it discusses different possible reasons for the importance of the miraculous within business texts. The paper suggests that business authors often ‘miraculate’ their object of study, that is they attribute mysterious powers to much less mysterious phenomena. The paper concludes by suggesting that miraculation does not have to be negative: it might well be a necessary road to successful business knowledge. This would explain why so much of what counts as business science today is based on the mixed methods of objectification and miraculation.

Keywords:

• miraculation
• radical innovation
• creativity
• business knowledge

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefitted greatly from suggestions by Nick Butler, Geoff Lightfoot, and Bent Meier S⊘rensen.

Notes

1. There are, of course, other accounts of transcendent miracles: the outside force is not always understood as one that ‘violates’ or ‘transgresses’ nature (these are the terms that Hume uses). For Augustine, for example, God should not be interpreted as an agent who operates contrary to nature, because ‘the will of the great Creator assuredly is the nature of every created thing’ (1972, 980). Augustine argues that miracles are themselves already present in nature. God does not need to intervene in nature because he has created the miraculous within nature. Such an understanding of the miraculous is already quite close to an immanent perspective on miracles: the idea that nature is itself the force that produces the miraculous.

2. They appear frequently indeed, though speaking of ‘the vast majority’ is probably somewhat an exaggeration. In this context, we should note that transcendent business miracles are the easiest to ridicule and that their appearance is often set up as a straw man to present a more ‘elaborate’ perspective on creativity and innovation, which is also the strategy that O’Connor and McDermott (2004) adopt.

3. From an Arendtian perspective, this is (of course) very uncanny. For Arendt, business organizations are the most unlikely places for action to occur. The profit motive of business subjects all activity to an instrumental logic: ‘the unexpected can be expected’, says Arendt ([1958] 1998, 178), but precisely not in the realm of work. If it were true that action is today more common in business than in public life, Arendt would find this a very frightening development because action would effectively be placed under the spell of work.

4. There are two notable exceptions in Difference and repetition in support of the reading advanced in this section. In the introduction, Deleuze writes that ‘if repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law’ (1994, 2), emphasizing the ontological priority of repetition over generality (and difference over identity). Later in the book (1994, 57), Deleuze approvingly cites the nineteenth‐century poet Benjamin Paul Blood: ‘Nature is miracle all. She knowns no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different.’ In general, I think Schleiermacher has a point when he says that ‘miracle is only the religious name for event’ (1994, 113), which would make Deleuze (alongside Alain Badiou) the secular theorist of the miraculous par excellence.

5. The term ‘emergence’ is especially used in relation to complexity theory and recent developments in the natural sciences (e.g. Edquist 1997; Pascale, Milleman, and Gioja 2001).

6. Hannah Arendt’s concept of action is interesting in this regard: while human miracles derive from action, these miracles can never be expected and always appear unexpectedly. We might say that while they are acted, they still require a passive stance. This is why Arendt ([1958] 1998) says that the actor ‘is never merely a “doer” but always and at the same time a sufferer’ (190).

7. With the successes of the natural sciences, scepticism about the possible existence of miracles reaches beyond the scientific realm. In philosophy, one finds few discussions of the miraculous between, roughly, the eighteenth and the twentieth century. According to the theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1970, 93), even theology downplays the importance of the miraculous in this period: miracles have become an ‘embarrassment’ to theology, which now searches for a scientific proof for the existence of God.

8. Indeed, the very concept of evidence‐based management looks more like a management fad (designed to protect the career of management academics?) than a ‘properly’ tested scientific theory.

9. Stefano Harney (2005) offers a different reading. Harney argues that the miraculating tendencies in management texts are to be understood as a symptom of the increasing inability of management to control and measure immaterial labour. In his reading, the miraculating tendencies are a sign of weakness rather than of the execution of a conscious and profitable strategy.