Dr Martin James

(ROUGH DRAFT)

Some people are fortunate enough to find a calling early on in life. I remember a friend turning up at high school already knowing she wanted to be a vet. At 11 she had it all mapped out and only had to follow the plan. Lucky her!

For the rest of us it may be hard to know whether we chose what we do or whether it chose us. My quasi-obsession with critical theory and philosophy started with A-Level sociology and I never managed to shake it off, despite a few noble attempts. Weber rightly said that “knowledge is disenchantment” whilst economics is aptly described as “the dismal science.” My hard-to-define area of study rarely fills you with joy (it’s far more likely to drag you the other way) and yet it remains an endless source of fascination.

Academia is a tribal game played by specialists working in silos. There isn’t much room to be a “Jack of all trades” but I am convinced that narrow spheres of interest and expertise is a factor in the disconnection between social theorists and the “real world” they try to explain.

My sole interest is in telling the true story of whatever I am focusing on. This has only become more difficult with the advent of a “post-truth” disinformation age of aggressive propaganda. It is not as if propaganda ever went away but it has certainly become more pronounced. Academia could and should be a bulwark against these trends but unfortunately, it has been crippled and decimated by decades of political meddling (at least in the UK context).

To make matter worse self-congratulatory academics have themselves added to the foundations of the present “post-truth” era. The likes of Derrida and Foucault were truth deniers long before right-wing press or politicians adopted it as their default setting. In the UK people like David Knights and Hugh Willmott brought their constructionist/deconstructionist (these are distinct but I won’t go into that now) epistemology into the mainstream of organisational behaviour . These critiques were highly insightful and yet I have long held the view that they were opening Pandora’s Box.

This was bad enough but I also held the view that they were fundamentally wrong in their conceptualisation of “how the world works” (to borrow from Chomky’s signature concern). Frustratingly their counter-argument is baked into their core assumptions, which in practical terms means that they fall back on relativism as a denial mechanism. This reductionism has likewise become mainstream, with extremists writing off any and all critical counter-argument as “your truth” which is different from “my/our truth.”

It is little known that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species gathered dust in libraries for many years after its initial publication. It only received notice when it came to the attention of an obscure right-wing politician, who saw it as a valuable weapon in presenting plutocracy and extreme inequality as “natural.” The thesis therefore owes its fame to political opportunism and the ever-present need to legitimise the illegitimate rather than its inherent merits. My point is that everything societal is political and that includes dusty old tomes on biology let alone “post-truth” propositions. To be fair, it is hard to anticipate how your work may eventually be corrupted in service of those with self-serving agendas.

Anyway I digress. Irrespective of its origin and nature “post-truth” has been a regressive inversion of enlightenment values. If “post-truth” had any emancipatory potential it has not been realised, quite the opposite. As unfashionable as it may be in the current situation I believe there are extra-discursive truths, that those truths are knowable and that we each have a duty to discover them and share them.

Despite occasional misgivings this task has become my calling, and I hope to spend the next few decades professionally rising to the challenge. It seems like a struggle I/we are bound to lose but what’s the alternative, the status quo!? Right now (6 weeks into the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK) only a tiny minority are primed to accrue the wealth benefits of a full restoration of what went before. It’s down to the rest of us – the supposed non-“elites” – to force upon them a better/fairer world for those other than themselves. It has happened before and it can happen again. My interest in organisational behaviour, industrial relations, political economy and HRM (i.e. how organisations are resourced and in whose interests) stems from a belief that these are some of the few remaining pockets of resistance within HEIs. At no point in modern Western history has resistance been more desperately needed. Climate change alone has seen to that.

The overwhelming majority know nothing of my work, interests or concerns and I’m fine with that. If its fame, money or glory you seek then academia probably isn’t for you. Like many who have taken this path though it’s not so much a choice but a lack of choice, in that all the other options seem worse.

This probably isn’t the most inspiring monologue you’ve ever read but it’s the truth. Perhaps “post-truth” has to be dealt with one truth at a time.

Below I will attach some of the papers I am working on. I welcome the views of experts and none experts alike. I’m fine with a bit of trolling too but please have the decency to make it entertaining!