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Liberal Education, Summer 2004
What's a Cultural Studies Curriculum
Doing in a College like This?
By Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Danna
Greenberg |
A few years into the new millennium,
following the disastrous events marking the autumn of its
first year, the global media sounds an increasingly urgent
alarm about the widening cracks in the global "order," describing
divisions of race, religion, nation, gender, politics, and
worldview that mar the promise (perhaps naive, yet once powerful
nonetheless) signified in the term "global village."
Read in this light, Peter Stearns's lead
article, "Teaching Culture," about the failure of cultural
studies research generated at scholarly and graduate levels
to be expressed in practice in general education curricula,
carries a particular urgency--an urgency that transcends the
usual disciplinary turf battles and canon wars that often
mark such discussions. Stearns calls for the carving out of
a "modest new space" of "inclusion of explicit cultural analysis
in . . . liberal education sequence[s]," acknowledging the
disciplinary and organizational challenges that this work
would present to scholars, educators, and administrators.
Stearns asserts that "there is a crying need to relate this
aspect of cultural research and training to cultural analysis
more generally" in an effort to "encourage students to think
critically about basic assumptions."
Stearns's diagnosis that cultural studies
paradigms generated as "new knowledge" by scholars and graduate
students have not made their way "down" to undergraduate curricula
is astute. His assertion that undergraduate programs need
precisely the "habits of mind" cultivated by cultural studies
methods in order to prepare students to be world citizens
capable of managing--and perhaps even energizing--the weary
planet they stand to inherit is one to which administrators
and educators alike would do well to pay heed.
Keeping these ideas in mind, we will
lay out a model of one such "modest space": the incorporation
of cultural studies methodologies into undergraduate curricula
across the "divide" of management (specifically organizational
behavior) and liberal arts courses at Babson College, a small,
private college that awards the Bachelor of Science degree
in management. Specifically, we will provide ways of thinking
about such curricular advances that move beyond specific courses,
knowledge bases, or methodologies to reveal how underlying
assumptions about individuals operating within cultural contexts
at the heart of the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies
may influence curricular design and course delivery on an
institutional level.
Cultural studies
Before beginning, it is crucial to identify
the differences between cultural studies as a discrete, interdisciplinary,
intellectual practice, and the study of culture in disciplines
such as anthropology and sociology. Stearns differentiates
between the "cultural turn" taken by many disciplines, including
sociology, anthropology, history, and English--a turn that
featured cultural analysis as an "examination of the impact
of fundamental beliefs and values …on social patterns
and personal behavior"--and "the interdisciplinary amalgam
called cultural studies." It is important to note, however,
that the methods and assumptions of anthropology and sociology
as modes of "cultural study" differ in critical ways from
those of cultural studies, a field that arose in the late
1960s with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England.
That development, headed by New Left British intellectuals
such as Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, and Raymond Williams,
had its origin in literary studies and authorized a focus
upon popular culture as an "object" worthy of academic study.
Indeed, in its original manifestation (in a kind of manifesto
delivered by Hoggart), it was received with unmitigated hostility
by sociologists at Birmingham!
Unlike anthropology and sociology, cultural
studies does not focus upon observing, describing, interpreting,
and drawing conclusions about individuals operating within
cultural contexts, but rather examines the role of representation
in language, image, and text as both productive and reflective
of cultural power relations. Given its intellectual foundation
in the New Left, described as "a political movement that was
socialist in nature, strongly anti-imperialist and anti-racist,
broadly supportive of the nationalization of major industries
and the abolition of economic and educational privilege,"
cultural studies as a mode of intellectual inquiry is positioned
as inherently oppositional to dominant cultural and economic
formations, especially capitalism (Schulman 1993). This positioning
makes its pedagogical expression at a college of business
like Babson a particularly complex and interesting phenomenon.
The question of how such an inherently oppositional discourse
might operate within the institutional context of the dominant
culture, then, will also be addressed here.
Curricular structure
A brief trek over Babson's curricular
terrain will help to situate our discussion in structural
terms. First, the curriculum is three-tiered, operating at
foundation, intermediate, and advanced levels. Students take
courses at all levels across the curriculum (that is, in both
management and in liberal arts); this point is crucial for
the inclusion of cultural studies methodologies at all three
curricular stages. Rather than the liberal arts side "having"
students for the first two years in a core curriculum and
then sending them over to management professors who "finish
them off" in a major, students engage in a parallel course
of study at all three tiers, enabling professors on both sides
of the house to engage students with ideas, methodologies,
and assumptions that may well complement one another in productive
and stimulating ways--some of which are clearly based in concrete
modes of cultural analysis.
The other structural point of note is
closely related: The curriculum at Babson is based on competencies,
or learning outcomes, rather than upon content coverage or
the accumulation of knowledge per se; most of these
formal competencies are "culturally based" in the sense that
they directly address students' ability to analyze a variety
of disciplinary problems "in a world characterized by diverse
cultures and ways of knowing" for the express purpose of being
able to "contribute responsibly to a changing and uncertain
world" (Babson Student Core Competencies). Of the twenty-seven
competencies that Babson graduates are ostensibly able to
demonstrate, almost all seek to cultivate the precise attributes
that Stearns asserts are within the purview of cultural studies
analyses: "replicable skills" and "habits of mind" that can
be applied to a variety of personal, professional, and social
problems and situations.
Such habits of mind are practiced on
both sides of the curriculum through, among other means, the
lens of cultural analysis; this practice begins immediately
with recognition of the fundamental biases that can permeate
undergraduates' perceptions of business and their own management
success. Because of their limited work experience, traditional
undergraduate students upon entering college often fail to
recognize the impact that the larger cultural system has on
their interpretations of an organizational problem and on
the actions they may take in response to that problem. In
helping students to develop their management capabilities,
professors begin by helping them to recognize their own conceptual
frames. Cultural analysis becomes a critical tool for students
to examine the simplicity of their initial views about business,
and for enabling them to reframe these views by recognizing
the impact that culture, structure, and politics have on individual
and organizational successes.
Cultural perspective
One of the foundational biases to be
addressed with undergraduate business students relates to
their belief that quantitative data represent "the truth."
Students often believe that the value of their business education
lies in learning various formulas and technical skills for
calculating
financial, accounting, and statistical data. Students imagine
that their future success in business depends upon their ability
to perform complicated quantitative analyses that generate
the "correct number." What they fail to recognize is that
there is no "truth" inherent in quantitative data. Quantitative
data--like all data--are contingent upon the larger cultural
lens through which one interprets those data.
Cultural studies assumptions, then, help
students to deconstruct and reframe this initial bias. In
adopting a cultural perspective upon quantitative analysis,
professors teach students to recognize how and why different
organizations may use the same financial data to justify vastly
different courses of action. Using assumptions derived from
a cultural studies perspective, students learn to analyze
how two organizations may differ in terms of their political,
cultural, and structural systems and how these systems impact
an individual's interpretation of quantitative data. Students
begin to recognize that quantitative data do not represent
truth, but like all data, are subject to interpretation that
is impacted by the cultural aspect of the organization. In
learning to engage in a cultural interpretation of quantitative
data, students begin to develop more nuanced analytical skills.
These analytical skills are also central
to pedagogical goals at the three curricular levels in the
liberal arts. The curriculum provides students the opportunity
to utilize the skills of critical analysis in increasingly
demanding courses based upon students' intellectual and cognitive
development over their four years of study. Disciplinary frameworks
built upon the groundwork of the Foundation Program's competencies
are introduced at the intermediate level, with intensified
focus at the advanced level. These competencies include critical
analytical abilities in thinking, reading, speaking, and writing;
the ability to tolerate and explore ambiguity; and the ability
to reflect critically upon one's own cognitive processes,
knowledge bases, and value systems.
The competencies, then, are practiced
through textual analysis guided at all levels of the curriculum
by questions that drive the cultural studies paradigm: in
particular, questions about the construction of identity,
of acknowledging identity as a construction, questions about
the conditions and forces behind the production of identities
and of cultural texts, questions of the role of aesthetics
and ethics in the production of a range of cultural texts.
Students are challenged in the liberal arts to interrogate
the idea of truth--of the ways in which phenomena taken for
true or universal belief systems or cultural practices are
actually ideologically, institutionally, or culturally determined--in
both textual and individual-social contexts.
Cultural analysis
Within the context of this three-tiered,
competency-based curriculum, then, students might begin to
experience a conversation, or dialogue, across the disciplinary
space between some liberal arts and management courses. While
the courses maintain their disciplinary integrity, they do
share common ground in their reliance upon cultural analysis
as a mode of critical inquiry. In considering the foundation
for such a cross-disciplinary conversation in terms of cultural
studies assumptions, one primary motivator and/or outcome
of studying identity as constructed in both management and
liberal arts settings is the de-centering of the individual
as a category with primacy in the U.S. and its dominant national,
cultural, and economic narratives. In the liberal arts, the
emphasis upon social construction and upon studying the power
of social categories of class, race, gender, sexuality, and
nationality calls the very idea of the autonomous individual
actor into question. Rather than accepting the individual
as a given form for "the self," the individual as an historically
situated idea with practical implications for the organization
of cultures and the prioritization of shared value systems
becomes ground for analytical study and interrogation by students.
Significantly, it is not without consequence in the context
of a business school that the idea of the individual in the
West is historically situated precisely in the rise of capitalism
itself, nor that, by contrast, cultural studies arises from
an engagement with
questions that Marxism as a theoretical
project put on the agenda: the power, the global reach and
history-making capacities of capital; the question of class;
the complex relationships between power…and exploitation
(Hall 1992, 279).
Given this paradoxical positioning, it
is worth considering how cultural studies questions about
the individual in relation to structures of power and dominance
might be manifest on the management side of the curriculum.
One of the ways "in" to these questions
is to enable undergraduates in the context of their management
coursework to examine the extent to which they may be biased
by their belief in their ability to control their own destinies.
Undergraduate students in the U.S. have often been taught
to conceptualize success as something that they can control.
This frame proposes that students can make the choice to work
hard and then they will be "successful," rewarded for their
work. This frame is further reinforced by the dominant myths
that proliferate in American business culture, such as that
contained in the narrative of the American Dream. Young management
students often believe the Horatio Alger legend that anyone
can go from rags to riches through his or her own hard work
and determination. Again, the downside of this frame is students'
failure to recognize how culture, structure, and politics,
as well as identity categories such as race, class, gender,
nationality, or sexuality, influence an individual's ability
to succeed--not to mention the very notion or definition of
what counts as success.
Cultural systems
If students are to take control of their
journey toward a life that is successful for them in real
terms that transcend the dominant ideology of individual power
and glory--in other words, if they are going to find and maintain
meaningful agency--they must recognize the role that culture,
structure, and politics play in every individual's ability
to succeed. They need to recognize that while an individual
manager's hard work will have some direct influence on her
success, this relationship is both mediated and moderated
by cultural factors. The challenge is to help students develop
their organizational acumen such that they learn to recognize
the effects of the cultural system within which their work
is situated and to understand how this system may affect their
actions and organizational successes.
The study of culture in an anthropological/
sociological sense can be used to help students learn to analyze
an organization as a cultural system. From this vantage point,
the organization can be viewed as a community with its own
unique norms and values that organizational members are encouraged
to share. Students learn to be "anthropologists" in an organizational
system as they describe how language and structure reinforce
the culture of the organization. For many students it is challenge
enough to conceptualize an organization as a cultural system
and to acquire the skills needed to describe such a system.
Yet, the more important and more difficult pedagogical goal
is to help students understand how this cultural system influences
their ability to successfully take action within the system.
Traditional undergraduate students, with
their limited work experience, struggle to understand how
organizational systems influence individual behavior. As such,
professors must find creative pedagogical approaches that
enable students to make these connections on their own. While
classic research in organizational theory such as the 1950's
General Electric and Tavistock studies can be useful for introducing
students to the relationship between culture, structure, and
individual behavior, for undergraduate students to fully appreciate
the connection, they need the opportunity to see how language
and structure can influence their own behavior. Since student
resistance to the idea that cultural forces influence their
own success is often quite strong, it is helpful to generate
a gestalt moment in which students realize that they have
behaved differently than they might have expected, and that
this behavior stems primarily from the cultural system in
which they have found themselves.
Once undergraduate students appreciate
how cultural context affects their agency, they can begin
to critically examine cases in which the organizational system
influences someone else's actions or ability to succeed. This
move gestures toward what Joanna Zylinska (2004) identifies
as a central tenet of cultural studies: the "ethical dimension
of infinite responsibility to the other." This gesture is
ethical in its desire to create a better good--derived from
a deeper, more critical understanding--not just for the individual
but for "others" who share organizational and/or global space.
Students' over-identification with and
emphasis upon individual agency can also lead them to ignore
the political systems that operate within an organization.
The political system of the organization not only influences
individual agency, it also determines what actions are followed
and who is given credit for them. Since students often believe
that power and politics in an organization are "bad," a cultural
lens can be useful for comprehending how power and politics
are inherently embedded in any cultural system. The challenge
is to develop a political lens which enables one to expose
and examine the interrelationship between power, politics,
and culture and to explore how all these systems affect individual
agency.
Through cultural analysis, then, one
begins to empower students to more effectively implement their
ideas and take action in an organization. The pedagogical
challenge is to avoid inadvertently disempowering students,
who may develop the fatalistic viewpoint that all action is
predetermined by the culture, structure, and politics of the
system. To avoid disempowerment, professors must focus not
only on analysis of the cultural system but also on teaching
students how, through such effective analysis of the cultural
system, they can better take action in an organization.
The idea of action, of finding agency
within one's cultural context by making visible the structures
of power and dominance operating within that context, is another
arena that connects liberal arts and management through a
commitment to studying what Stuart Hall (1992, 280) has termed
"the enormously productive metaphor of hegemony." In its indebtedness
to the work of Italian politico-intellectual Antonio Gramsci,
cultural studies as a field of inquiry is grounded in the
project of exposing the workings of power, which most often
disavow themselves, solidifying their dominance through narratives
that represent that dominance not as dominance, but
rather as the natural order of things, or the "ideology of
common sense, known to all ‘normal' people as the right
and proper way of life" (Hall, in Zylinska 2004). Such attention
to exposing and analyzing the workings of power as part of
a specifically resistant politics originating in cultural
studies is another interesting, seemingly unlikely development
at a college known for producing "world leaders in business."
However, just as cultural studies demands
that scholars and teachers refuse simplistic analyses that
situate objects of study or texts as seamless productions
of knowledge, so too a business college cannot be read as
a seamless productive site, (mis)construed as a locus of unthinking
celebration of the power of the individual as maverick and
of the rise of global capitalism as pure opportunity in a
reductive cost-benefit analysis. With its focus upon ethical
corporate practice, upon critical inquiry into the nature
of globalization as both an opportunity for global advancement
and as a phenomenon riddled with material inequity, upon the
responsibilities of the entrepreneur and the role of the "social
entrepreneur," Babson is a complex intellectual and economic
site with a multifaceted relationship to the serious inquiry
demanded by cultural studies into the nature of power, culture,
and identity.
Cultural studies in the academy
Indeed, the practice of cultural studies
at Babson runs the same risks that the institutionalization
of cultural studies as a whole within the dominant culture
of academic life has had to run: how to maintain its critical
legacy while functioning within the very structures of dominance
(academic, cultural, and economic) that it is often mobilized
to critique. Are its tools being co-opted, or has it managed
to carve space on broad enough ground to enable students to
undertake the critical project that its proponents imagined
could happen both in and outside the academy? In the liberal
arts at Babson, much coursework and faculty scholarly production
maintains the tradition of cultural studies in questioning
the distribution and function of power in its myriad forms.
Many texts, topics, and courses in the liberal arts divisions
continue in this vein, starting with the Foundation Program
in its commitment to considering the impact of social categories
upon the individual. Reliance upon and grounding in close,
informed, evidentiary readings of texts enables the work in
such courses to transcend the status of political advocacy
or indoctrination precisely because it is based in the most
rigorous forms of cultural analysis. In the end, this mode
of textual analysis empowers students to operate as ethical
actors in their increasingly complex cultural contexts precisely
by bringing the functioning of those contexts--regardless
of political positioning on the right or left--to consciousness
and the critical light of day, helping students to recognize
and decide whether to consent to global power structures.
The same holds true for the central project
of Organizational Behavior. While it is important for students
to analyze the influence that cultural systems have on agency
in organizational contexts, the primary focus in Organizational
Behavior at Babson is to help students learn how to navigate
the culture of an organization in order to create change.
Debra Meyerson has coined the term "tempered
radicals" to refer to individuals in organizations who want
to succeed in their work and want their organizations to succeed
but who have ideals, agendas, or even identities that mark
them as different from the dominant organizational culture.
As such, tempered radicals often have initiatives they want
to introduce into the organization that may well challenge
the dominant culture and force the organization to change.
These initiatives range from ideal-based--focused upon issues
around ethics and diversity--to task- or strategy-oriented--focused
on introducing innovative new processes, structures, or technologies.
For tempered radicals to succeed they must learn how to closely
analyze the organization's cultural system as they determine
how best to introduce a change initiative.
Through the lens of the tempered radical
and the role that cultural analysis plays in the tempered
radical's opportunity to succeed in changing the system, students
can begin to develop an empowering frame for their own agency
in organizations. The goal in an organizational context is
to build legitimacy for one's ideas and to slowly introduce
change in a way that is not threatening to the existing power
systems. As such, the only way to execute such a change strategy
is to begin with a close analysis of the existing cultural
system.
This idea of the tempered radical may
strike some cultural studies practitioners as the antithesis
of the organic intellectual of the 1960s New Left. While there
may be some authenticity to the original, inherently marginalized
position of cultural studies, the truth is that its ideas
about cultural construction and the forces of hegemony have
made their way into a variety of undergraduate curricula--even
those that may, on the face of things, seem oppositional to
its political project. However, such a reading of a simple
co-optation of an "oppositional" discourse by an institutional
"mainstream" does not do sufficient justice to the complex
range of pedagogical strategies originating in cultural analytic
modes at a place like Babson. When studied with precisely
the nuance demanded by the discipline of cultural studies
itself, Babson's pedagogical and scholarly culture reveals
a commitment to broadening consciousness of social justice
and a recognition of the need for social change, for responsible
social entrepreneurship, and for ethical agency and action
across the great divides of our global arena.
Works Cited
Hall, Stuart. 1992. Cultural studies and its theoretical
legacies. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler,
eds. Cultural studies. New York: Routledge, 277-294.
Meyerson, Debra. 2001. Tempered radicals: Change agency
in the 21st century organization. Boston: Harvard Business
School Press.
Schulman, Norma. 1993. Conditions of their own making: An
interdisciplinary history of the Centre of Contemporary Cultural
Studies at the University of Birmingham. Canadian Journal
of Communications, 18: 1. www.wlu.ca/~wwwpress/jrls/cjc/backissues/18.1/schulman.html.
Stearns, Peter. 2004. Teaching culture. Liberal Education,
90: 3.
Zylinska, Joanna. 2004. Guns n'rappers: Moral panics and
the ethics of cultural studies. Culture machine: Generating
research in culture and theory.
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/articles/zylinska.htm.
Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg is
assistant professor of English and Danna Greenberg
is assistant professor of organizational behavior at Babson
College.
To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org,
with the author's name on the subject line.
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