CMS Conference 2009

6th International Critical Management Studies Conference

13-15 JULY 2009 WARWICK BUSINESS SCHOOL, THE UNIVERSITY

OF

WARWICK, UK

Stream: Feminism and Critical Race Theory? Thats Chapter 12. Doing Critical Management Studies as if Feminism and Critical Race Theory Really Mattered.

Paper: Race (E)Raising Race and CMS Continually Smacking White Boys Hands as They Reach for the Enlightenments Dimmer Switch

Dr. Neville Adams Senior Honorary Research Fellow, City University Senior Research Associate, Middlesex University Senior Research Associate, T3E Pan-European drug policy NGO N.adams@city.ac.uk Tel. ++44(0)2086894963

Race (E)Raising Race and CMS Continually Smacking White Boys Hands as They Reach for the Enlightenments Dimmer Switch Abstract This paper briefly surveys, and analyses, the absence of race as a substantive interrogative and coalescing dimension in Critical Management Studies: an absence manifested visibly by the low numbers of Black1 participants in the conferences. It argues that CMSs posting of race to the exotic banlieue of postcolonialism is a silencing gesture, whether intentional or not. This form of uncriticalness is seen to inhere in postie type theorising - -modernism, -structuralism, -colonialism, -feminism - , and thus CMSs we-are-a-broad-church managed consensus provides only a liberal, muffling solution. Three, not exhaustive, aspects of CMS are examined: conceptualisation of race, language of race, and performativity. On the bases of these it further argues that reclaiming critical as an emancipative ideal and practice, and not just seeing it at the metaphorical level, is vital for the substantive inclusion of race. Part of this involves refurbishing performativity as a democratising practice: one that should be applied to the organisation of the CMS conferences. Introduction
All of this (the violent memories of white survival in Africa being seen as a form of divine intervention) found expression. Silence itself was a form of articulation. Even in the early work of much admired writers .. blacks are simply absent. The farms and villages of the country are represented as if only whites lived there. In the novels of other writers black characters feature sometimes in comic relief, or as a kind of descant to white themes in the local literature. (Brink, 2009)

One can take the above quotation as a metaphor for the treatment of race in the CMS oeuvre, and in which the relegation of race to postcoloniality features, sometimes, as comic relief to those signposted there black humour, if you like. There is a silence, and hard to trace bespoke action, which sees race marginalised in the assembly of CMS as a movement, which I take the bi-annual conferences to represent. CMSs internal trajectory of race mirrors the recurring lifecycles of race in the UK public sector within which can be found the educational sector and thus universities. This is a state of affairs in which the anti-discriminatory affairs of state, as expressed in the legislation, in the UK, particularly in relation to the public sector, place it as one of the most developed in Europe, if not the
"Black" is used throughout this paper in its widest political sense as a signifier of those who experience racism but from which cannot be presumed the way such people describe their cultural identity. I want to go further however and say that the use of the term "Black" by a person should be both a signifier of those who experience racism because of perceived differences of colour, and of potential heterogenity. It is thus an invitation to engage in inclusive communicative discourse and not presume a definite identity.
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world. Yet it is also, in the provincial world of the UK, one in which Black people, according to the governments own information databases, are still the most marginalised in terms of most well being indices social, health, education, political involvement. This is a marginalisation which is public and visible. It can be seen in the government sponsored racialisation of those of Muslim faith, the latest instalment of which is being publicly played out in the Metropolitan Police Force; in the openly argued for re-colonisation of parts of the Third World, in which Iraq serves as a stark example; in the turning back of the clock to year zero making Black people all immigrants again another time, another place, very little space; in relation to asylum seekers and refugees, in presenting repatriation as an everyday practice acceptable to a large part of the public; in the pursuit of a neo-assimilationist agenda in relation to social cohesion race equalitys poisoned chalice; in the borrowing and recreation of detention laws aimed primarily at Black terrorists which would have made apartheid South Africas rulers blanche. The list can go on. It is also a marginalisation which ensnares and utilises other parts of the public sector, even higher education, as secondary arms in the racialisation process, as exemplified in the recent events at Nottingham university. This is an almost surreal world in which there is the very public language of valuing diversity and celebrating difference goes hand in hand with the infliction of racialised collective wrongs. Race is everywhere, yet paradoxically, finds little dialogous space in todays public sector in the sense of those directly affected being a participant to the identifying of the problem and defining of the solution. To some extent, then, there is an echo of the contours of, struggles over, and debates about, gender and gender and race in social and political theory played and replayed over the past three to four decades. (Hooks, 1984; Hill Collins, 1991; Benhabib, 1992; Fraser, 1997) It helps evince the argument that there is an informal contract in Western epistemology and social practice to suppress race and gender. (Mills, 1997; Mills and Pateman, 2007) Action limited to research, knowledge transmission in the academy, and conferences every two years might speak of at-long-last-recognition-andacceptance by higher seats of learning, as was lauded in one panel members end of conference speech in 2007. On the other hand it might depict that university authorities have cottoned onto the fact that much of CMSs proponents simply relish in the aesthetic pleasure that writing critically provides, and that these sociological/political literati would rather suffer silently at their inability to make a difference, than invest in emancipative practice. Confirmation, then, that the neo-conservative political effects of that position can easily be translated into instrumentalised performative knowledge without the need for disciplinary techniques because the proponents are so self disciplined. To that extent the silence on race might simply be down to a larger silence posties unwitting acceptance of the overwhelming power of neo-liberal capitalism. However for those of us for whom emancipation still matters, and on whose behalf others, without involving us, have arrogated the right to declare emancipation another oppressive fiction, there is a need for an urgent corrective to CMSs still unfurling claim to be radical. Thus the memory of attempts to secure race equality as a stand-alone stream in previous CMS

conferences, being met by variations on nobody seems to be interested, youre too late or, marginalisingly worse still, there is the postcolonial stream, and where, at the last CMS conference, including myself, the number of Black attendees could be counted on one hand are symptomatic of a problem that goes to the heart of CMSs epistemological and ontological bases and re-energises the question of what exactly is critical about CMS. Fournier and Grey provide a very useful and succinct barium meal analysis of the state of play in relation to the differences between those who lay claim to being critical. (Fournier and Grey, 2000) Thus it is true that there is a cacophony of voices out there from people who are concerned with conditions of oppression, exclusion and domination. But it is not just mainstream management which has remained deaf to these; CMS has shown itself equally willing to deflect these voices. My argument is that this exclusionary process inheres in the conceptualisation of race in the overall theoretical conceptualisation of emancipation in CMS, especially in its rapprochement with postie theorising to the extent that bracketing post type-theory with emancipation is oxymoronic. Because there is no permanent anchorage of race or gender in the thinking through of criticalness in CMS, it mimics the short term amnesia which is to be found in mainstream management and institutions. The lack of institutional memory means that those who experience racism and/or who challenge racism, and bring this to bear on their critical involvement, are forced to tell and re-tell narratives of oppression as a stratagem for securing their survival. Finding a home for racialised critical management interventions at conference time, within the institutional responses of youre too late, or no ones interested, or being redirected to the Bantustan option of postcoloniality, gives rise to a form of involuntary equality mainstreaming whereby the submission often sits uncomfortably in the stream which has a soupcon of possible relevance. The Proposition The paper then rests on my foundational argument that racism creates those conditions within which can be glimpsed modernity fulfilling democratisation from the margins over the centre, as well as the nightmare scenario should such communicative blockages be maintained in place. It will argue that critical management studies exclusion of race as a substantive area of enquiry in its own right, one that goes to the heart of CMSs epistemological and ontological bases and re-energises the question of what exactly is critical about CMS, derives from, at this stage at least of a WIP, three interlinked, peripherising problematic characteristics: Conceptualisation Language Performativity

Conceptualisation With regard to the first, and I include in this the neo-Leninist and neoMaoist claw-back of a materialist emancipatory interest that is Zizek (Zizek, 2006) and Badiou (Badiou, 2006) - race has been relegated to the shadows, as the explicit exclusion, or a dismissive epiphenomenon, or tangential displacement into culturalisation. CMSs rapprochement with postie theorising, and thus aiding in the misappropriation of the term critical, has helped succour the distantiation of race. Distantiation refers to the stretching of communicative channels so that participants lose sight of what they should be communicating about, and those they should be communicating with. A unilateral switch of organisational equalities language or interspersing additional levels of bureaucracy in a communication channel are prime examples. For example, one local authority replaced its race and womens units with a broad based equalities unit. By 1994 this had merged with the Central Policy Unit to become the Central Policy and Equalities Unit. By 1998 it had reverted to the generic Central Policy Unit, losing all aspects of an explicit equalities dimension.. The anti-racist employment programmes and action plans were rewritten, and ameliorated, into positive action plans. The term ethnic minorities replaced Black. Therborn provides another dimension to distantiation when he writes that the final mechanism of inequality, distantiation, is the most subtle of all: the mechanism or channel most difficult to pin down morally and politically. (Therborn, 2009) Within the postie genre modernist, -structuralist, -colonial (races newest dumping ground) - race and racism fall within the purviews of a particular construction of discourse formation which in itself is not a way of describing the world, but a form of social power, the origins of which are difficult to trace.
"....we are asked to believe that human beings are now so speciated by gender and race - though we are silent about class - that there can be no universal knowledge, politics or morality. These ideas have not grown up among the masses defeated by the empty hopes of our kind. It is not the masses who have sickened of the injustice and exploitation that grinds their lives, weakens their families, starves their children, murders and terrorises them each hour of the day and night in every corner of the world. No, it is not these people who have abandoned idealism, universalism, truth and justice. It is those who already enjoy these things who have denounced them on behalf of the others." (ONeil, 1995)

The social and political regressive nature of postie theorising has been made cogently and articulately by others. (Benhabib, 1992, ONeill, 1995; Habermas, 1990; Dirlik, 1998) In relation to race, the context to such conceptualisation is one in which there is deliberate attempt to ditch social systems and society for micro/fragmentary analyses, and despite that "essentialist" characterisation in secondary commentaries, post modernist theorists are just as universalistic as those they criticise. For example,

Foucault and Lyotard both have produced totalising, ontologically reductive, empirically challenged theories of historically complex situations which are over-generalised and simplified. The underlying premise that the history of the human species is characterised by increasing power of instrumental reason is just as metaphysical as those who presuppose an evolving pattern of social progress. The credit crunch has brutally denaturalised capitalism for many, cutting through the supposed impenetrable fog of dominating diskourse, and demonstrated the link with race and gender the first governmental areas of collateral damage as it tries to cope in a way that CMS, and in particular those who are still inclined, in a weak resistance way, to discourse about it, can only envy. It is no coincidence that the growth in neo-konservativism, which accepts a highly technicised modernism, but a regressive culturalism, since the 70's has seen a growth too in the nouveau conservatism of post modernism. To wit post-modern ideology is the paradigm of all forms of submission and compromise with the status quo. (Guatari, 1992) Conservative, not only because of the liberal pluralist assumptions of their theorising, but because their opacity of agency has the potential for irrationalist conclusions which the celebration of the "Other" cannot performatively judge or condemn. This results in what I term the Sowetoisation of Race the Other really is the other out there. Additionally it is a form of theorising which has legitimated the emergence of the new ethnicisation of race. The white corporate world has not been slow to capitalise on this and linguistically repackage the unacceptable race, race equality, and affirmative action as diversity. However, more importantly, it is difficult to escape, what one critic has described as a process tantamount to cultural doping, and to envisage, let alone, enact, any alternative, other than weak resistance. The social construction of race then appears to be the perpetual process of constituting and being constituted by this discourse to the extent that even those who oppose racism can be seen to become enmeshed and contributing to that which they are trying to eradicate. But to constitute it in such terms runs the risk of ceding too much descriptive power to the discursive formations of post-structuralist inspired discourse theorists: an oeuvre of work contributing to the disempowerment of the racialised in the public sector. This is because the foundational theories underpinning such an explication have politically conservative effects, even if the intent was not there, to the extent that it can be argued that part of the reasons for the current theoretical and political impasse on race can be laid at the doors of those who have prematurely given up on the enlightenment. At the general level this finds some critical overlap with others who have attempted to pursue a universalist agenda which avoids the pitfalls of a reductionist social labour based theory. (Gilroy, 2001) Moving out of racism for these thus entails an end to race as a viable epistemological category and into the purported primary domain of culture. These approaches, united in their motivation by a rejection of social labour grounded theories of racism, result in a similar approach to understanding race and racism which is that one can only talk about racisms, and not racism, a multi-causal plurality in which theoretical lacunae can be filled either by reference to a never ending relativism or that

stop gap of contingency, the autonomous. The call, thus, for people to show respect for other peoples origins, family .. (and) community, (Modood, Taylor, Parekh) has resulted not so much in more race talk, as Malik contends, but in a palimpsesting of race by equal value culturalist discourses. In other words celebrating differences but not being able to discuss fully those differences. (Malik, 2008)) This is a process of hierarchical distantiation being set in the structures of communication so that representation keeps out democratisation. The under girding of this view by postmodernism is best captured by Meera Nanda who argues that whilst western postmodernists can at least take the hegemony of liberal ideas for granted postmodernism in modernising societies like India serves to kill the promise of modernity even before it has struck roots. This has provided fertile ground for Hindu supremacists who, taking their cue from Indias postmodernist intellectuals desire for a more humane, feminist and less reductionist science to emerge from the oppressed and neglected peoples in non-modern cultures, have argued that that is already present in the dominant form of Hinduism a form which can deliver the decolonisation of the mind. These intellectuals have helped deliver the people they profess to love. To the growing forces of hatred, fascism and religious fanaticism. (Malik, 2008)) Those arguing for the valorisation and celebration of difference the micro-narratives cannot but have an open door policy through which all sorts, like the creationists, can expect entry. In other words, good for white boys, if I might borrow a Foucauldian metaphor, writing their careers on racism whilst advocating to Black people that equality, freedom and justice are the creations of the brothers Grimm. The post-colonial has, I suppose the prima facie advantage of having the imperial and colonial past as a constant nomenclatured reference point in the name it calls itself. The spheres of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonialism have altered radically the understanding of imperialism, nation and race,. However, the major fault line is that such theories, as with much post-structuralist thinking, have functioned at the metaphorical level, and it is necessary for them to return them to the reality of material mediations.. The focus of the post-colonial in the metropole is that of Black people who have either emigrated there, or are long term subject populations. These are the sources for an identarian politics which is not simply built around the structures of power internal to the city(but).is also a politics constituted by a broader history and geography of colonial inheritances, imperialist presents and post-colonial possibilities. (Jacobs,1997) I am not so sure that the colonial remembrances are so firmly embedded in Black populations a few generations down the line from those who first immigrated. I have argued before that it is the here and now which are more important for identity claims, rather than pseudo-histories The post colonial critique tries to provide a new conceptual framework which, whilst not denying the structures of domination, also points to the contingent nature the Self/other relationship. There is then, in such theories, a greater sensitivity to the culture of imperialism. Whilst the post-colonial, then is signified by the formal independence of former colonies after the Second World War, it attests as well to the continuing force of neo-colonial formations and lives shaped by the ideologies of domination and the practices of prejudice

established by imperialism. (Jacobs, 1997) Post-colonialism, then contains a hope for liberation which puts it beyond the limits of existing power relations. There is thus a diversity of perspectives within the overall category of post-colonialwhich all claim to be counter-colonial. But, given the importance attributed to the possibility of pure post-colonialism, which is captured in the theorisation of contingency, there is the expectation that this should give rise to strong emancipatory counter-drive. What emerges, however, is something altogether weaker. The reasons for this have already been analysed in the critique put forward of the post structuralist position in which the subject becomes the subject-effect of various constituting forces. Apart from which the contradiction between the emphasis placed upon subject-effect within such contingency, and the achievement of the emancipative possibilities of post-coloniality is exemplified in the almost teleological construction of waiting for imperialism to undo itself. It is here, then, at this juncture between real world change and the deconstructive trail of a post colonial analysis that the problem occurs. In the final analysis, to coin a phrase, the post-colonial critique of imperialism, race and the nation does not adequately acknowledge that notions of universalistic rights and participation can be used against the excluding practices and inequalities which the posties claim are inherent in those processes. The limitations of post-colonial theorising is captured in Dirliks acerbic view, viz., post-colonialism is the moment when intellectuals from nations of what would until recently have been called the Third World arrive in universities and begin to speak in the vocabulary of post-structuralism, celebrating diversity and rejecting categories of capitalism and class. (Dirlik, 1997) He goes on to link multinational capital with the resurrection of multi-culturalism to the effect that the intellectual elites who now celebrate diversity are allowed to do so provided they do not point to the global capitalist order that has created their privileged status. If there is a real world criticism of the instrumentalised performative appropriation of aspects of post-colonialism by the state, it is that its has helped make long settled Black populations in the metropole into immigrants again through the essentialist conflation of visible minority communities with a metaphoric conception of third world diasporics; control through the dislocation of time and space. Long fading questions about integration, and, in the case of the UK, self segregation of certain Black communities, re-emerge as supposed dangers to the host. Neo-assimilationist solutions garlanded in the rhetoric of social cohesion are pursued by government to effect the explicit construction of British values, and to merge, or in some cases displace, equality responsibilities with, or by, community cohesion. Within post-colonialism, the here and now of race and racism in, say institutional practices, is displaced into the politics of diasporas: a form of culturalism inviting the imagination of fictive homelands somewhere out there, and unfortunately giving succour to communitarians. .Race is not out there; it is here and now, insinuated into the very fabric of Black and white peoples experiences, as evinced by the organisation of this CMS conference requiring the need for a paper like this. The culturalist use of the term post-colonial suffers because it both conflates, and by its own logic, celebrates, four aspects of the prefix post. These are the signifying

reference to formal political independence, the, in my view premature, giving notice of a closure of one historical period, the mainly cultural continuance of imperialism, and the possibility of a future pure form of post-coloniality, i.e. no more colonialism. My argument would be, in line with the Habermassian contention, that modernity still has to run its course, that it is too early to close the door, however, circumscribed, on colonialism both systemically and in terms of social integration, where in the latter the application of the theory of lifeworld colonisation is still appropriate. To that end the persistence of colonialism, even if today its articulation differs, but is not substantively different, from its previous incarnation, requires terms which are more precise. I want to use two new ones which refer to two distinct, though related stages. The first is that of re-colonialism which refers to the recursive nature of racism and coloniality and the way in which certain aspects of such patterns of domination and exploitation can be reproduced in the metropole. These are built around erecting or resurrecting distorting forces in the structures of communication with Black people which are derivatively similar to those which evolved in the colonies. The second term is that of trans-coloniality which refers to those struggles and social processes which seek to challenge and extirpate such colonialist forces. It is only thereafter that the current arrogance of the post can come into play. Language The visible and audible language of race, has over the past three decades, been amplified through the UK public sectors - including the academy declarations of its anti-discriminatory intent. Yet surveying the current circuitous linguistic map of race equality in wider public sectors, one cant help wondering, as in the myth of Babel, whether or not those who originally dared to use the terms race, racism and race equality, in trying to make accountable powerful, but unjust, societal forces, were punished by the powers that be for erecting so direct a tower, that they were thereafter forced to speak many languages. Language can be disabling or enabling because it can define who can speak, what can be said, and, more importantly, what cannot be put on the agenda. It can help identify, or misdiagnose the problem: recognise the solution, or signpost a cul-de-sac The clarity of that link between race and racism is now obscured by a multiplicity of terminological and conceptual obfuscations. Race has been displaced by equal opportunities, ethnicity, diversity, cultural competence, social cohesion, social inclusion and a host of other sub-terms, like minority ethnic all of them jostling and competing with, or misdirecting the best means to do away with race as a destructive force. CMS has not been immune from this, relegating race to the exotic outposts of post-coloniality or diversity. But there is more to the changing terminology than just conceptual fashion statements because they reflect the small p political battles over the direction of race equality in the public sector over the past twenty five years. This has been marked organisationally by what I have termed distantiation, closure and ossification all of which generally characterise the extinction of spatial communicative bubbles which Black people had struggled to attain and which now, in the neo-liberal aftermath would revert to the resumption of

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hierarchical, dominating relationships. The establishment has been quick to define the problem in their own language and terms. In that they appear to have drawn far more from post-structuralism, than the emancipative demands of the oppressed, because, quite rightly to their way of thinking, why opt for radical change demands when encouraging the gaze on exotic embodiments will suffice. In the States, diversity has evolved as white corporate Americas revenge on affirmative action. A similar evolutionary pattern can be discerned in the displacement of equalities by diversity in the UK. To coin a phrase then the deliberately chosen limits of their language actively limits my world. ONeill is right; if there is no extratexuality, then it is we who are outside of language once the signifiers outstrip the referents. It gives rise to a corporate Babel -and the issue of the mal-description of equalities in institutions is a clear example where language holds no centre and the double struggle to ethical individuality and social reciprocity, is blocked. Thus the naturalisation of language is the ideological counterpart to dehistoricization and depoliticisation of capitalist process.(ONeill, 1995) We, who are committed to an anti-racist and race equality approach - one predicated on a radical programme of democratisation - must re-affirm and re-assert the primacy of this framework not, therefore, because we wish to be, and be seen as, culturally or individually different, but because tackling race and racism, as social constructions, points the way to addressing other inequalities. We assert this then because the task enjoined on us by the legacy of racism is that not only do we not want to see visible minorities treated in this way, we do not want to see any one else, particularly those experiencing the unjust forces of social discrimination women, disabled, gay men, lesbians, Muslims, Jewish people, working classes treated in that way either. Performativity One of the key problems with CMS, in its current configurations, is that its operational definition of performativity borrows too heavily from the Lyortadian intrumentalised definition of performativity. Performativity is conceived of almost solely in terms of intrumentalised reason. This is an indebtedness to postie theorising which revels in the erroneous conflation of modernisation and modernity. At this level anti-performativity is limited to that of resistance, often weak resistance, or effectively, absence of resistance through non-engagement for fear of corrupting contamination. But this limited notion of performativity in fact better termed instrumentalised performativity - has little to do with a performativity which arises out of our everyday ability to communicate with each other which has ethical implications that determine the conditions of critical discussion through which moral claims and actions can be justified. (Edgar, 2006) The assumptions of truth, meaning and truthfulness which are implicit in any communicative moment, and in which there is the assumption that participants so affected by the issue have the right to participate fully and freely, are the conditions upon which moral claims to justice can be launched. The moral claims for racial justice launched by the racially oppressed are done so not just at the metaphoric level, but in the real world, mediating level of the community and workplaces. They are done so within

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a legislative context in which there is the normative potential to redeem some of those claims. The performative contradictions - i.e. action that is at odds the basic assumptions institutions must make in order to act justly arising from the reality slippage from the ideal, are not proof of the appropriation of equality change intent and translation into instrumentalised performative knowledge. Instead these are the sites of struggle for justice because brought directly into the process of discursive will and opinion formation are the claims for racial justice. To that extent I would contend that the moral in issues of racism cannot be categorically abstracted from discursive practices in the sense of dialogous practices, as opposed to the effects of discourse - of democracy and law making. This then is the arena of the performativity associated with the legal requirements of the antidiscriminatory legislation which is predicated upon the potential for a democratising accountability, and not just that of the production of efficiency: despite the attempts of those to put forward a business case. The lack of a mediatory theorising and politics results in two basic performative contradictions which are evident in postie thinking: the hubristic assumption that they have escaped the domination of reason which always corrupts enlightenment emancipative attempts, and, the presumption of a liberal pluralism more open to the right of difference and otherness, i.e., they depend upon the legal and moral achievements of modernity so that the outcome of the rapport soi, even if it is a fractured self, has the right to pursue his/her sense of the good. In terms of race, against a backcloth of discriminatory employment practices and race differential student educational processes, the question of what exactly CMSs adherents are doing in the academy raises its head. This failure to address properly this area - a failure which is represented as well in the lack of detailed attention paid to how the administrative system can be made more democratic effectively wipes out as meaningful the struggles by Black people and women in these institutions to have their moral claims for racial and gender justice to be redeemed. The insertion of moral claims for racial justice into the processes of such institutions - processes which, within public sector institutions are more than just work related ones - means that the redemption of these claims, because they are boundary disruptive, will span a continuum of action with the possibility of democratising the administrative system. Rethinking Race Critical Race Theory (CRT) claims to provide a means to refocus on race as a substantive social and political issue, but one that appears to have a limited reconstructive potential. CRT merely provides a new and different lens and way of systematizing the search for knowledge .. (and) .. helps avoid the search for easy answers, focuses attention on social construction and mindset, asks us to attend to the material factors underlying race and racism, and to go beyond the ordinariness of racist action and treatment. (Delgado, 2001) Defined like that it sounds like an operational methodology which can be applied to other situations, an unfortunate utilitarian approach which sees it being used in certain race

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theorising in the UK. Working, and also thinking, through the ordinariness of race and racism has been an evolving component of those involved in the explication of race community groups, activists, employees, academics, researchers, trade union members, specialist equality workers in the glare of the anti-discriminatory intent of the public sector since the mid-seventies in the UK. One of the lessons that emerges from that is the need to reconceptualise race and racism in a way that is transformative, not simply analytical. Race critical theory is a term appropriated by some, but which resembles a race version of the modest deployment of CMS concepts and theoretical resources (as the result of) .. the pressure to publish and build academic reputation draws mainstream researchers to these relatively unexplored and unexploited resources in larger numbers, and in turn is likely to lead, at least to some extent, to the smothering of CMS critical concepts and emancipatory projects. In other words race critical theory is meaningless. Contra that I want to argue for race and racism as a communicatively framed social construction: a construction that goes to the heart of modernitys democratising fulfilment or not. I want to argue for a racialised critical theory capturing both the oppressive aspect, which the absence of race from CMS exemplifies, as well as the centrality of race to the emancipative solutions. The detail of this is argued elsewhere. (Adams, 2002; Adams, 2008) Briefly we have to look at race within a paradigm which advances the argument against racism within a universalistic context, but one that avoids the social labour incorporatist pitfalls of Marxism. Symbiotically co-joined with this new argument is a linked need to re-fantasise the outlines of a substantive racially inclusive form of governance. My approach, then, is to try and put forward a social constructivist argument about race and racism which is communicatively, and thus, evolutionarily, framed. Because in the unjustly racialised, multi-racial society, one can only talk about languages, and not a single language, as the linguistic medium, this linguistic plurality engages with political change through translatability, transmutability and transformation. The nature of institutional mediation between the public sector institutions and local life worlds has to be seen as fuzzy allowing for an indeterminacy in which transformative action can occur. If de-racialising race is inextricably tied into a radical democratisation towards modernitys fulfilment, then diskourse transgressions, because of their very nature, or transgressing those diskourses, cannot be limited by the acceptance of a position in which weak-resistance-is-all-that-can-be-expected, even if it is resistance by writing diskourse analysis. It requires the active participation the discursive participation - by those castled by their visibility in the defining of the problems and solutions.

Performativising CMS

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The question then, in pigeon Latin, is: Quo Vadis CMS? For race, and similarly for gender, critical has to mean unmasking the power relations around which social and organizational life are woven and that recognising that every form of social order entails some forms of domination and that the critical-emancipatory interest underlies the struggles to change those relations of domination-subordination."(Morrow, 1994) ..It also means being pragmatically oriented to emancipative change, and, race and gender considerations being the explicit part of the grounding fulcra around which inequalities are analysed. The critical question is not simply the recognition that whilst there are substantive arguments at stake between different kinds of CMS positions, it is also possible to see these differences as being less important than those between CMS and noncritical management .. (and that) .. if CMS is to have any future as a movement if such it be then it would seem more important to create alliances between Marxists and post-structuralists (to name the principal cleavage) than to degenerate into recondite squabbles about differences. (Fournier and Grey, 2000) Rather, if CMS is to be a social movement, which performatively inheres in the prefix critical, then not only should we champion the cause of the oppressed, we should make sure that they the oppressed are engaged and involved in this. For those not enamoured of this idea because we should keep our critique to ourselves and simply relish in the aesthetic pleasure that writing critically may provide, should disavow the use of the term critical for to continue with that is to engage in a performative contradiction, which in the case of race and its constituencies, silences them. The depiction of CMS as a fragmented and slippery domain, fractured by multiple lines of division, or, more commonly a broad church is not a positive valorisation, but an indication of a stultifying impasse with race and gender hierarchilising, differentiating effects. If the notion of critical, as preferred immediately above, cannot be rescued from the debilitating appropriation of postie theorising, then perhaps it is time to reclaim the emancipative thrust through the formation of new movements Critical Institutional Practices, or Critical Organisational Practices, in which studies are but one form of practice. Im(mediate)ly, however, there is no reason why those charged with organising the CMS conferences should not heed the legislative, antidiscriminatory positive duties placed on public sector organisations, like universities, to consider explicitly the race and gender dimensions to their undertakings developing to the full the normative potential of the law. Being performative, in this sense, means ensuring that, if CMS is, by its own general credo, committed to race and gender equality, then its own actions should not undermine or contradict those. Running an equality impact assessment of the proposed CMS conference a public sector lawful requirement which, arguably could be applied to the conferencing activity could have thrown up, for example, the need for stand alone streams on race and gender as the first consideration, not semi-exiled to the end of the page; the need for the substantive involvement of race and gender constituencies in the organising process; the need for contribution criteria to

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all streams to include explicit consideration of race and gender a practice long established when it comes to report writing in other public sector organisations; the need to examine where the conference is advertised in order to increase the number of Black participants, and so on. When it comes to the everyday practice of race inclusiveness, being critical isnt rocket science, anymore than just writing is critical practice.

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-----. 2003 On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction, Polity Press. Hill Collins, P. 1991 Black Feminist Thought, Routledge. Hooks, B. 1984 Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, South End Press. Jacobs, J. 1996, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, Routledge, Loomba, A., et al. 2006 Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Duke University Press. Malik, K. 2008 Strange Fruit, Oneworld Publications. Mills, C. 1997 The Racial Contract, Cornell University. Morrow, R. 1994 Critical Theory and Methodology, Sage Publications. O'Neill, J. 1994 The Poverty of Postmodernism, Routledge. Pateman, C. a. M., C. 2007 The Contract and Domination, Polity Press. Therborn, G. (2009, 6th April). `The Killing Fields of Inequality.' Open Democracy [Online]. www.opendemocracy.net. Wittgenstein, L. 2008 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge. Zizek, S. 2006 The Parallax View, MIT Press.

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