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ABSTRACT
Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help organizations become more innovative by reconfiguring them in ways that can facilitate the unimpeded flow of information between as many of their employees as possible. They are thus a prime example of phatic experts, inasmuch as they present themselves as people whose expertise turns on establishing channels of communication and contact between employees. In addition to ensuring that they make their clients and their products more innovative, innovation consultants must make socially legible their own economic actions, and themselves as economic actors who are capable of such actions, as part of what sociologists call a profession’s ‘technical mystique,’ that is, expert knowledge made visibly concrete and socially recognizable. Based on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA, I examine what phaticity looks like in the contemporary business world; how phatic ideologies regiment what counts as appropriate ‘contact,’ ‘channel,’ and ‘communication’ between organization members; how phaticity is mediated as a socially legible genre by means of material artifacts and the built office environment; and what rhetorical functions and outcomes such a mediation has.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Of course, different professions can share the same means to mediate their expertise (see Prentice Citation2019 for the use of PowerPoint presentations in South Korean office work).
2 In broad brushstrokes, those functions include a focus on the addresser, on the addressee, on the message for its own sake, on metalinguistic communication, on reference to the interaction’s broader context, and on the conditions of possibility for communication and contact between interactants.
3 To be sure, Jakobson’s theoretical framework was a necessary though insufficient condition for such theoretical sophistication. A few contemporary anthropologists who study phaticity have continued to equate contact with positive social communion (see Zuckerman Citation2016 for a critique).
4 Between 2012 and 2016, I conducted fieldwork with four innovation consulting firms in the United States (mainly in NYC) to understand the normative ideals and practices of business innovation (Wilf Citation2019, pp. 10–13).
5 As I have argued elsewhere, innovation strategies that purport to enable free information flow often frustrate it when they are implemented in practice. This is the case of the two key conditions of possibility for innovation that I examine below, namely the open-plan workplace and post-it notes. The open-plan workplace often produces alienation, fatigue, and communicational breakdown among employees (Wilf Citation2020), whereas post-it notes often create pragmatic ambiguity and conceptual confusion among their users (Wilf Citation2016), as well as paper-based clutter that goes against the grain of the ideal of the innovative office as a ‘friction-free’ communication space (Wilf Citation2019, pp. 124–146).
6 This cybernetic and communicational engineering conceptual framework also influenced neoliberal economic theories about how markets should be organized in order to make sure that they remain rational and efficient. In turn, those neoliberal theories played a crucial role in encouraging the rise of innovation strategies that are based on the idea that free and unimpeded information flow between as many organization members as possible is the key to making the business organization innovative (Wilf Citation2020).
7 Innovation consultants project onto phaticity the same kind of recuperative potential that can be found in other ethnographic contexts. For example, organizers of and participants in the truth and reconciliation commissions of Latin America and Africa project a recuperative potential onto such commissions’ communicative structure that turns on communicative openness, equality, and freedom, that is, on the idea that opening ‘a communicative channel between previously unheard indigenous peoples and agents of the state’ must lead to positive and reconciliatory outcomes (Slotta Citation2015, p. 132). However, whereas the architects of this communicative structure, such as Habermas, have attempted to derive the principles of its design from ‘a “transcendental pragmatics” … or a “universal pragmatics”’ (Slotta Citation2015, p. 136), the intellectual history of the organizational communication infrastructure that is supposed to lead to innovation is anchored in cybernetics, communication theory, and neoliberal theories (Wilf Citation2020).
8 For example, Andrew Orta has traced the contribution of a number of influential publications written by business managers to the rise of the culture concept in US business management in the second half of the 20th century. This rise culminated in the replacement of visions of a globally standardized business landscape with the idea of international business defined by cultural differences that can have an economic impact both as challenges for business and as untapped value. This conceptual shift in turn produced both the demand for managers who can balance ‘standardization with the nuances and niches of localization’ (Orta Citation2019, p. 92), and the supply of such managers by an ever rising number of business schools that designed their curricula accordingly.
9 See Wilf (Citation2015) for the importance of ‘planned accidents’ in the cultural order of business innovation consulting services.
10 Of course, such interpellation is not always successful (see Wilf Citation2020 for concrete examples).
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Notes on contributors
Eitan Wilf
Eitan Wilf is a cultural and semiotic anthropologist whose research interests focus on the institutional transformations of creative practice in the United States and in Europe. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the institutionalization of jazz music in academic programs, the practice of business innovation consulting services, and the development of art-producing computerized algorithms and sociable robots. He is the author of School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity (University of Chicago Press, 2014), and Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Wilf holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago.