Sacrifice and management are not words that one expects to hear in the same sentence. But – as those who read my earlier post will know – I’ve been reading theology in my spare time, so when Marcia Pally invited me to talk on sacrifice and the economic world at an interdisciplinary workshop I was happy to accept. Here’s an expanded version of my 
contribution to Marcia’s workshop ‘Sacrifice: Biological and theological investigations for economic and military/political praxis’, held at Humbolt University, Berlin, 16-17 June 2016 funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Theology Faculty of Humboldt University-Berlin. Many thanks to both funders and to Marcia for her kind invitation. This piece was first published on the Telos website.
“Sacrifice, or at least the discourse of sacrifice, is a recognizable aspect of popular management discourse and management scholarship of the ‘post-bureaucratic’ variety, especially popular in America from the 1980s to the 2000s (Child, 2005; Peters, 1992; Peters & Waterman, 1982). The absence of bureaucratic structures of command necessitates other forms of authority, and notions of sacrifice form part of the symbolic armoury of the post-bureaucratic chief executive – though, of course, post-bureaucracy is itself a symbolic myth more than a practical solution (du Gay, 2000). In this talk I will set out some aspects and suggest, playfully, that there are crypto-theologies at work in management discourse and scholarship; I will finish by connecting these to the sacrifice and excess inherent in neoliberal forms of organisation.
So let me start with two exemplars. The first is American businessman Lee Iacocca, 
celebrated for his self-sacrifice in saving the struggling automotive giant Chrysler for a salary of $1 a year. Certainly, Chrysler received government bailout – some $1.5bn in loan guarantees and huge military orders of trucks, but Iacocca put the company’s turnaround to his own sacrifice, and its inspirational effects on those around him. The second is Mark Zuckerberg, who has committed to give away 99% of his holding in Facebook stock – worth $45bn dollars, in his lifetime. What is interesting from the perspective of sacrifice is his decision to do so through the legal form of a limited liability corporation, and I’ll return to this point later on.
Both of these are very high profiles of management sacrifice; both are accompanied by other, less newsworthy, everyday sacrifices – the jobs lost in Chrysler’s reorganization, or Facebook’s value built on the unpaid contributions of millions (billions?) of users (Scholtz, 2013). This kind of discourse speaks to a very specific notion of sacrifice – one that is calculative, strategic, and self-aware. It is part of the armoury of the charismatic or transformational leaders vaunted in management literatures: typical findings include that self-sacrifice leads to the attribution of charisma, the establishment of legitimacy the encouragement of follower reciprocity, an increase in organizational commitment and team efficiency and a decrease in perceived autocracy (Śliwa, Spoelstra, Sørensen, & Land, 2013).Continue reading “Sacrifice and the crypto-theologies of management”
Philip Roscoe 