Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations. André Spicer. Organization Theory, June 4, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787720929704
Abstract: Why is bullshit so common in some organizations? Existing explanations focus on the characteristics of bullshitters, the nature of the audience, and social structural factors which encourage bullshitting. In this paper, I offer an alternative explanation: bullshitting is a social practice that organizational members engage with to become part of a speech community, to get things done in that community, and to reinforce their identity. When the practice of bullshitting works, it can gradually expand from a small group to take over an entire organization and industry. When bullshitting backfires, previously sacred concepts can become seen as empty and misleading talk.
Keywords: activity theory, bullshit, domination, power, resistance
The first characteristic of the speech community which is conducive to bullshitting is a large number of potential suppliers of bullshit. One important source of supply are conceptual entrepreneurs. These are actors with a stock of pre-packaged concepts they try to market to others. Many conceptual entrepreneurs operate in the management ideas industry. This is a sector made up of consultants, gurus, thought leaders, publishers and some academics (Sturdy, Heusinkveld, Reay, & Strang, 2018). The quality of actors operating in this industry tends to be extremely variable. A consequence is that some of the conceptual entrepreneurs seeking to peddle their wares in the management ideas industry are bullshit merchants. There are some sub-sectors of the management ideas industry where bullshit merchants are particularly concentrated. One is the ‘leadership industries’ (Pfeffer, 2015). This sub-sector includes many consultants, speakers, experts and advisors who create and distribute pseudo-scientific ideas about leadership (Alvesson & Spicer, 2013). A second sub-sector with a significant concentration of bullshit merchants is the ‘entrepreneurship industry’ (Hunt & Kiefer, 2017). This is the cluster of mentors, (pseudo-)entrepreneurs and thought leaders who push poorly evidenced, misleading and seductive ideas about entrepreneurship. Often their target is so-called ‘wantrepreneurs’ (Verbruggen & de Vos, 2019). In some cases, these ideas have been found to encourage vulnerable young people to adopt what are seductive but empty and misleading ideas about entrepreneurial success (Hartmann, Dahl Krabbe, & Spicer, 2019). For instance, Chen and Goldstein (forthcoming) followed a cohort of students at a mid-ranked North American university as they joined a campus-based business accelerator. Many put their lives on hold to launch start-ups. When these eventually failed, they often found themselves struggling to re-enter the mainstream labour market. They also tried to grapple with the ultimately meaningless and misleading advice about entrepreneurship they were exposed to during their time in the accelerator.
A second aspect of a speech community which can foster bullshitting is noisy ignorance. This is when actors lack knowledge about an issue yet still feel compelled to talk about it. It is not just the result of a lack of cognitive ability (however, it could be; Littrell et al., 2020). Rather, noisy ignorance is mainly due to a lack of understanding or experience concerning the issues being discussed. Often that ignorance has been strategically cultivated (McGoey, 2012). In some other cases, actors deliberately avoid gathering information or knowledge about an issue. In other cases, noisy ignorance is created by knowledge asymmetries where one party knows much more about a particular issue than another. When an actor is relatively ignorant about an issue, they do not have the wider background knowledge in order to compare new claims. Nor do they have an understanding of the right questions they might ask. This means they rely on relatively crude understandings of an issue yet tend to be much more certain than an expert would be (Raab, Fernbach, & Sloman, 2019).
When ignorance is noisy, uninformed actors do not simply stay silent about what they don’t know. Rather, they are compelled to speak about an issue of which they have little knowledge or understanding. A recent experimental study found that this compulsion to speak (coupled with a lack of accountability created by a ‘social pass’) was an important factor in explaining bullshitting (Petrocelli, 2018). Similar dynamics have been found in field studies. For instance, middle managers are often relatively ignorant about the work their subordinates are engaged with, but are under pressure to act as the leader by doing or say something (Alvesson & Spicer, 2016). They fall back upon generic management speak rather than engage with the people they manage in language they find meaningful. A second example is British government ministers who find themselves with a new policy portfolio (King & Crewe, 2014). Often these politicians have little or no knowledge of the new policy area, but they are under pressure to say and do something. To address this tricky situation, politicians rely on empty and often misleading language.
There also needs to be an opportunity in a speech community to use bullshit. Such an opportunity typically appears when a speech community is infused with permissive uncertainty. This is a situation where actors do not know what will happen and are willing to consider almost any knowledge that might plug this epistemic gap. They face high levels of uncertainty, yet have permissive epistemic norms which guide the problem of sorting out what to do. This creates a curious situation where almost any knowledge claim goes. When faced with a wicked problem such as a significant and unexpected environmental change, some organizations experience high levels of uncertainty but also find that different kinds of experts claim ownership over the problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973). This can create experimentation, participation and dialogue (Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton, 2005). But equally, it can create multiple failures, conflict and drift. Under these circumstances, a greater sense of confusion can well up and an ‘anything goes’ approach takes hold.
The most obvious aspect involved in this kind of situation is a state of uncertainty (Fuller, 2006; Wakeham, 2017). This entails epistemic uncertainty which comes from having imperfect knowledge about the world. Epistemic uncertainty can also be generated by competing and overlapping knowledge claims which create a dense patchwork of contradictory truths, making it difficult for an actor to make a judgement about what they think is correct. In addition, people face ontological uncertainty. This comes from the fact that social reality is ‘inherently risky and always under construction’ (Fuller, 2006, p. 274). Even if an actor acquires knowledge about social reality, that social reality can shift and change. Such changeability makes it very difficult to be certain of one’s judgements.
What makes uncertainty even more difficult to deal with is permissiveness. This is created by relaxed ‘epistemic vigilance’ (Sperber et al., 2010). In some settings, relaxing one’s epistemic vigilance is a way of investing epistemic trust in another person or, at the very minimum, as a way of keeping conversation and interaction going (Sperber et al., 2010). This sets up what we might call ‘epistemic indulgency patterns’. These are similar to the industrial indulgency patterns which entail routine social interactions where an authority figure like a manager allows their subordinates to get away with otherwise banned behaviour (such as stealing materials from a factory) in exchange for compliance (Gouldner, 1954). A similar process happens with epistemic claims. This is when people are willing to indulge weak claims from others in return for indulgence of their own weak claims. When this happens, people begin to allow weak or empty claims to pass without too much scrutiny. If they were to engage in greater epistemological due diligence, then social interaction would become too costly, time-consuming and conflict inducing. These epistemic indulgency patterns allow bullshit to pass without more serious assessment.
When such epistemological indulgency patterns are paired with endemic uncertainty, it can create a confusing, yet liberating situation: no-one knows what’s happening and which bodies of knowledge they should draw on to sort things out. For instance, the process of rapid social change in the United States during the late 19th century created a great sense of uncertainty in many people’s lives. It led to the confusing multiplication of forms of knowledge and authority. This uncertainty coupled with a pluralism created an ideal setting where sham commercial ventures and questionable experts peddled their wares. In the medical field, ‘quacks’ (unlicensed doctors) outnumbered licensed doctors by three to one in many parts of the country (Janik & Jensen, 2011). Quacks offered miracle cures which had no basis in science. The market for their ‘bullshit’ cures flourished until the early 20th century when legislation reduced the permissiveness associated with medical knowledge claims. Arguably a similar process has occurred in recent years with the rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. These new technologies have created a great deal of uncertainty, but they have also enabled some degree of permissiveness around who is able to claim expertise in the technology. This has opened up significant space for bullshitters who talk about artificial intelligence but have little understanding of the underlying technology. This makes it not terribly surprising that a recent analysis of 2,830 ‘artificial intelligence’ start-ups in Europe found that about 40 percent of them did not use AI technology at all (MMC Ventures, 2019).
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