Michel Foucault was a French historian well known for his chaotic working methods. He based suppositions and theories on texts and impressions from prayer books, paintings and other individual items, without worrying about major interrelationships or even quoting his sources.

Foucault is thus regarded more as a philosopher than as a true historian.

And it was exactly this controversial thinker whom Wisse Dekker cited in February of this year when beginning his speech of acceptance for an associate professorship in Leiden: ‘Leiden in travail: new dimensions in management’. A history-related title, linked to a forward-looking business subject. At first sight a surprising and illogical combination.

But a closer look reveals that Dekker provides a useful method of analysing corporate cultures.

A Chinese encyclopaedia

In his speech Dekker quotes from a Chinese encyclopaedia compiled by Foucault which gives the following categorization of the animal kingdom:

1. animals which belong to the emperor
2. embalmed animals
3. tame animals
4. sucking pigs
5. sirens
6. fabulous animals
7. stray dogs
8. animals mentioned in this list
9. animals which run amok
10. animals which cannot be counted

A normal initial reaction on reading this list is to burst out laughing. It's also normal that you then try to discover a system in the list, which unfortunately doesn't seem to exist. After that you can't be blamed for abandoning it and getting back to daily life.

But that's not what Foucault does.

He doesn't spend much time wondering whether something is reasonable, but quickly gets down to, for him, the much more relevant question as to why the categories are as they are. What kind of people did these Chinese have to be to make sense of such a categorization, while we find it absurd?

And then Foucault starts a logical and ordered process of analysis which can very usefully be applied to cultural analyses in companies.

So that's how Wisse Dekker has helped us to link history and management.

The order of things

One of the first reasonable assumptions one can derive from the encyclopaedia is that the Emperor of China was an important man: he's named separately and he's the first on the list. So it also seems probable that sucking pigs occupy a higher position in the Chinese hierarchy than stray dogs. And you can also guess something about animals which have broken a jug.

So bit by bit it's possible to use an illogical text to ask logical questions; questions which are useful if we want to know more about the writer.

And it's precisely because the Chinese encyclopaedia makes an unordered impression that you're forced to look behind the text and thus gain a more ordered impression of the Chinese world.

Things get more difficult when the texts look reasonable. Then you're less likely to start reading between the lines. After all, the lines themselves are interesting enough.

But Foucault gives convincing demonstrations of how logical texts can turn out to be illogical once you've looked behind the facade.

The history of madness

In another of his works, ‘The History of Madness’, Foucault examines the development of virtues and vices.

Drawing on 13th-century texts originating in Paris and Amiens, he cites the ‘twelve oppositions which together account for the management of the human soul’ and then produces a sequence like that in the Chinese encyclopaedia, but at first sight much less crazy (incidentally Foucault only gives 10 of the 12 oppositions, and unfortunately here too without citing the source):

1. Faith and Superstition
2. Hope and Despair
3. Magnanimity and Meanness
4. Chastity and Lechery
5. Wisdom and Madness
6. Patience and Wrath
7. Gentleness and Hardness
8. Cooperation and Disunity
9. Obedience and Rebellion
10. Perseverance and Inconstancy

Working on the basis of this sequence, this categorization, we could conclude that in Northern France around the time of the 13th century the issue of Faith was number 1 in the top 10 of virtues and that Superstition immediately came at the top of the list of vices. Wisdom and Madness are in fifth place. Actually a little strange that they crop up in a list of virtues and vices. We Europeans of the 20th century don't immediately view qualities like reasonableness or unreasonableness in terms of good and evil.

The madness of reasonableness

Two centuries later in the Renaissance, however, we find that madness is still regarded as a vice and it has even progressed to the top position in the list of human frailties. The following list of vices originates from this period:

1. Madness
2. Self-love / egoism
3. Flattery
4. Forgetfulness
5. Sloth
6. Lust
7. Absent-mindedness
8. Softness / tenderness
9. Eating tasty food
10. Deep sleep

We can still imagine how self-love, flattery, laziness and lust can be seen as vices, even if we would tend to call them weaknesses now, but according to our standards the other elements no longer belong to this list of values and standards.

Lists as an instrument of power through the ages

With his lists Foucault clearly shows what a cultural change involves: elements are added to the lists of good and bad. Other elements disappear from the list, whereas others rise or fall on the list. It's a hit parade of what's right and what isn't, of what's normal and what isn't, of what's acceptable and what isn't and thus a source of tips of how you can get to the top and how you won't. It's a guide for the well-intentioned, for careerists and for people who want to belong to the group.

People who don't conform to prevailing lists will not gain positions of power. The lists dominate the country, the area or the company more than the people do: this is one of Foucault's favourite conclusions. If you want to change a corporate culture then you first have to work your way up via the list in order to try and change its order or composition.

And that's a pretty long-term project.

Not something you do on the spur of the moment.

That's one of the reasons why cultural changes take place so terribly gradually.

Company lists

The Foucault lists under discussion here can also be found in companies, but they don't look like lists. Nevertheless they can be distilled out of documents or events. They can be revealed, for instance, by decisions which are seemingly obvious but still don't get taken. Or they are manifested in what someone says or writes, in the terms used on forms, the way the internal telephone directory is categorized and the amounts used in calculations. Most readers of newspapers and magazines would accept that Reed-Elsevier has a list where short-term profit scores high and where there's certainly a place for innovation, but probably not higher than fifth place. Kluwer also seemed to attach importance to short-term profit, but it wasn't number one on their list. The quality of the authors would be a good tip for the top. Strategic plans from the 1970s contain many texts based on lists in which employment, reasonableness, justice and social involvement score highly. Such a list points to a non-market-oriented company. It's a simple fact that if you put the customer first then society in general comes afterwards, and vice versa.

Your own lists

It's a very tricky business for people in an organization to discover their own ‘list’; they think that everything they do, say or read is absolutely normal. Someone who lives in accordance with a list doesn't see his list as a list.