Slawomir J. Magala, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Gentrifying cultural consumption of art and of the mass education can easily be compared. Once upon a time the European social democrats opened up the Agardens of artistic treasures@ to the masses. AThe map of the museum had to be remade, its calendar adjusted to the latest beginning@(Lyotard,1999,p.305). Masses came. Today=s musea are catering to the broader public and entering the emergent networks of virtual exhibition spaces, but artistic values are as prone to crises as shares on a stock exchange. Likewise, in the last quarter of the century, a Trojan horse of the MBA program entered the turreted walls of the universities. Macdonaldization of higher education followed. Open and flying universities, virtual universities and faculties multiply and inhabit the educational earth. The roulette tables have also been turned: paradigms started winning and losing without metaphysical guarantees and without methodological credit cards.

AToday no one expects teaching, which is discredited everywhere, to train more enlightened citizens B only professionals who perform better.(Y) The acquisition of knowledge is a professional qualification that promises a better salary.(Y) This point of view only allows defensive and local interventions@(Lyotard, 1993,pp.6-7)

With the emergence of the MBA programs offered by schools of management usually attached to the universities (or at least staffed by the academic professionals with university credentials), new stakes in educational games have emerged. Do they justify the above statement by one of the leading representatives of the postmodernism? After all, the very term Apostmodernism@ has been first used by him in a paper commissioned by the Canadian educational authorities. Let us examine the difference between an Aenlightened citizen@ and a Atrained professional@ whose knowledge and skills have been upgraded. An enlightened citizen is supposed to contribute creatively to the quality of social life (for instance by making informed choices in the democratic processes), while a trained professional is supposed to perform more efficiently (for instance by increasing the amount of available goods and services). However, the definition of an enlightened citizen presupposes an opposition between a majority of unenlightened and a minority of those who had access to the higher enlightening influences (exerted by the higher academic institutions, to which only a small percentage of citizenry could be admitted). Education towards supreme enlightenment becomes more valuable when an institutional development guarantees scarcity but promises to remove it. The very success of Enlightenment in promoting higher education and in making it available to the broader masses changes the social perception of higher education and its relevance as a status symbol. To be enlightened after a successive enlargement of the army of diploma-holders means that earlier dreams of upward mobility are frustrated. One becomes a member of a growing Aclass@ of professionals (who refuse to see themselves as a class, unless it is a Amiddle class@ with very unsharp contours and uncertain solidarities managed by professional associations and peer control), not a member of a relatively small elite. The fact that someone has successfully collected university diplomas does not automatically confer social authority B the present day mandarins cannot reinvent a class solidarity of the past intelligentsia. A Ph.D. was an elitist title available only to the relatively few individuals, while an MBA is a title available to a much broader class of individuals. Moreover, it can be won without a prolonged apprenticeship in the authoritarian communities of academic excellence and a life-long commitment to them. Teaching is thus Adiscredited@, but only from the point of view of someone who expects academic teaching to confer an elitist status B not from the point of view of someone who expects teaching to result in upgrading professional skills and knowledge of members of a growing Amiddle class@ of professionals.

It is no coincidence that an almost forgotten term Aclass@ springs back to life as we try to understand the difference between the new games played in academic casinos and the games played before a dramatic growth of educational services after WWII. In the first half of the century most of the political Aleftists@, Aprogressives@ or Asocialists@ called for a universal access to education. What they meant in the context of their political programs and the availability of educational services - was a universal access to at least a basic level of educational services. With middle-level education slowly becoming a universally accessible service in the developed societies, the higher (university-level) and permanent (continuous upgrading schemes) education became focal points of social and political struggles. Stakes have been raised B but as there were many more who gambled for them, the ultimate result was that winners could count their profits in higher salaries and many small local differences - not in a universally recognizable difference of a higher status of those Amore enlightened@, more Awhite collared@, better endowed with Adiplomas - symbols of educational merit@. MBA diploma resembles an advanced driving license in an information society, not a royal act of raising to the ranks of intellectual nobility. One becomes more mobile in the knowledge space, but does not acquire property rights to any province of knowledge.

There is an interesting historical analogy between this loss of social status of a university-level education (an unintended consequence of a dramatic spread of educational services and of their growing accessibility) and a rapid loss of a social status of the art (an unintended consequence of a dramatic spread of the real and imaginary musea and of the growing accessibility of art to the general public). When critics and artists dreamed about opening the Apalaces@ of art to a general public, they tacitly assumed that art will continue to play the role it did in the past, when access to the works of art was limited and when art could be significant in demonstrating and maintaining status differences. Success in breaking down the class barriers and in broadening access to the works of art contributed to the growth of virtual exhibition spaces and to the increased mobility of the works of art in social space B but it also contributed to the blurring of differences between Ahigh@ and Alow@ art and to the loss of a status function of artistic consumption. Paraphrasing Bourdieu one might say that cultural capital does not get accumulated in a way which would give rise to neat social distinctions B random portfolios of individual investment of attention, study and competence building include valuation of high, low and accidental artistic forms, collected with no status strategy in mind. Moreover, collecting Aobjects@ of art becomes less widespread than collecting aesthetic experiences B which, again, demonstrates that what matters in modern cultural space is mobility and ability to participate, not to appropriate and Aown@ (as in an expression Ato own a collection@).

God may not play dice, but academic gurus do. It would be hard to expect otherwise, since the academic casinos have repeatedly been subjected to the knowledge process re-engineering. Re-engineering assumes the form of a methodological struggle and is fought over the paradigms in research and curriculae in teaching. The post-Popperian problems with relativism defended by Feyerabend emerged when it turned out that Popper=s falsificationism cannot salvage the neopositivist doctrine. The explosion of recent postgraduate MBA programs demonstrated that a pragmatic, flexible and mass-reproduced curriculum could emerge in the academic environment. Is it surprising that a different social function of academic diplomas and of the postgraduate teaching becomes reflected in a new paradigmatic world order (of the academic world)?

If social space lost the distinctions between upward social mobility and downward degradation (there is no point in climbing the elitist status if the army of climbers turns elite corps into a conscript army), if political sphere blurred the traditional distinctions between a left and a right, then why would one expect the academic space to preserve the old hierarchic (Amonarchistic@) order with a dominant paradigm in power and the other paradigms ridiculed, marginalized, imprisoned or banned?

The strange history of a social constructivism (Social construction of what? Of APandora=s hope@!)(1) is a case in point. Against the claims that there is a privileged realistic tradition(2) in the academic institutions, and that this tradition allows to distinguish between Aprogressive@ and Adegenerating@ research programs (as Lakatos had once suggested)(3), social constructivists suggest that the methodological revolution accompanying the Enlightenment was based on an Aextravagant@, Kantian form of constructivism and on the elitist fear of the Amob rule@(which might follow in case methodological policing of the research communities was relaxed):

AIf my friend=s voice quivered as he asked me >Do you believe in reality?= it was not only because he feared that all connection with the outside world might be lost, but above all because he worried that I might answer >Reality depends on whatever the mob thinks is right at any time=. It is the resonance of these two fears, the loss of any certain access to reality and the invasion by the mob, that makes his question at once so unfair and so serious.@(Latour, 1999, p.7)

Research programs pursued in the departments of business management show the limits of a Russian roulette in a choice of the research programs. Which are being chosen? The ones which stand a chance of being sponsored, financed and which are considered useful in furthering individual academic careers of the researchers (who come and go talking not of Michelangelo, but of instrumental reason, research communities and an on-going debate of the evolving collectives of researchers). Methodologies, however, are also chosen because of the replacement of bureaucracies with networks. A flexible network of researchers can sustain a research program and adds a new meaning to the catchphrase of a Alearning organization@ by demonstrating that professionals do not have to see the organizational ladders of standard careers as the only Agame in town@. Roulette tables can be turned, and there are many different roulettes to choose from (if Mao was alive, he might have said ALet thousand roulettes bloom@ on a state visit to Las Vegas). In the departments of organizational sciences of most schools of management one has - for instance - a choice between a massive, bureaucratic EGOS annual conference, and a much more informal, flexible, and smaller SCOS annual conference (the organizers of both tacitly recognize each other by scheduling their sessions so as to enable the researchers to attend both if they wish to do so).

AManipulating the level of risk taking, or the salience of diversity relative to unity, or the amount of organizational slack is a conspicuous example of the ways by which history can be affected by changing the level of variation or the effectiveness by which lessons and opportunities of the environment are exploited@(March,1999,p.108)

AAlternative and new forms of democratic and eco-sustainable organizing and managing with social audits of human resources are here.(Y) How to deconstruct status quo practice, explore and reverse the problematic hierarchies and then to resituate how the firm is managed? Resituate means learning new harmonies, new balances of power and freedom in a sustainable postmodern organization.@(Boje, Dennehy, 1999, p.33)

Institutional casinos and paradigmatic roulettes point out towards the gambling organization. AGambling@ is as a better metaphor for what happens in most of the present organizations than Alearning@. Still, most of the authors of managerial literature mention the ideal type of a learning organization and very few stress the uses of the gambling metaphor. March mentions the cob-weblike organizations which in his conservative eyes resemble throw-away products, marriages or companies, and indeed some forms of educational services are probably closer to McDonald=s than to a restaurant with a well-balanced menu. However, he does not give chance a chance and refrains from further exploiting of this metaphor. Modern neo-institutional economists add chapters on organizational learning to their handbooks, but fail to add that knowledge transfer, development of competence and management of meaning are higly risky gambles(4) which make organizations closer to the casinos filled with roulette tables than to the orderly structures for exploring and exploiting knowledge, whose genetic codes and mortality rates can be reconstructed by the inventors of some new research program (organizational ecologists, tacit knowledge theoreticians or political economists of information space).

1. APandora=s Hope@ is the title of a book by Bruno Latour (cf. Latour, 1999) on the construction of reality in sciences, not necessarily the social ones. The first chapter bears a revealing title ANews from the trenches of the science wars@ and aims at the defense of the Aconstructivist@ approach. The question ASocial Construction of What@ has been selected as a title by Ian Hacking (cf. Hacking, 1999)
2. A typical example of this Asilent majority@ in the academic communities has been provided by a study by Edward Wilson, whose sociobiological investigations have stirred some heated discussions about two decades ago (cf. Wilson, 1999)
3. Lakatos has developed his concept of a scientific research program within the framework of the post-Kuhnian disputes among the APopperian@ philosophers of science (cf. Lakatos, 1970)
4. I have taken the titles of three subchapters on management of learning from a typescript of a new book by a colleague of mine (cf. B.Nooteboom, 2000)