Blinded by the slide show: Ignorance and the commodification of expertise

Abstract

This article investigates how commodification operates with reference to expertise, rather than material objects. By drawing on the work of German management consultants, it highlights three forms of ignorance that arise as part of commodifying expertise. These are here described as ignorance due to profit, ignorance due to rhetoric and ignorance due to strong assumptions. These forms of ignorance render invisible the wider socio-economic effects of consulting, hide the degree to which corporate representations may not reflect the world they purport to describe, and postulate specific yet highly skewed understandings of freedom regarding human subjects. Taken together, they point out that a distinguishing feature of the commodification of expertise, vis-à-vis that of material objects, is that it provides greater scope for the creation and use of ignorance, as it blurs the boundaries between commodity and context.

Dynamics of wilful blindness: An introduction

“…This allows East Timorese oil company employees to move in and out of awareness about the potential failure and negative side-effects of oil infrastructure development. These kind of ‘conviction narratives’ (Tuckett and Nikolic, 2017) influence people’s disposition towards various kinds of information – as becomes clear in Felix Stein’s (2020, this issue) discussion of blindness in a consultancy firm. Rhetoric, pragmatism and strong assumptions allow management consultants to compartmentalise awareness in a way that is beneficial to the aim of maximising profit.…”

The Value of Planning: Views from Management Consultants

“…Despite the belief that management consultants should be aware of the impact of their advice on firms' ultimate clients (Schein 1997)-and in light of evidence to the contrary (Stein 2020)-it is difficult to see how this would be accomplished for planning work. 13 In other fields, such as manufacturing, if a management consultant advises a firm to cut its workforce, the results may be clear, such as a decrease in product quality and a negative impact on customers who buy the firm's product.…”

“…In contrast, assessments of management consultants' influence on government agencies address broader societal and public interest issues such as policy convergence, changes in public service provisions, and democratic processes (Saint-Martin 2000;Vogelpohl 2019;Vogelpohl and Klemp 2018;Weber and O'Neill-Kohl 2013). Ethnographic accounts have shown that that the profit motivations of management consultants have led to their ignorance of the broader socio-economic impacts of their advice (Stein 2020). Importantly, the clients of consultant services are not just limited to the firm itself, but can include…”

On the banality of wilful blindness: Ignorance and affect in extractive encounters

“…Lengthy presentations followed, providing detailed information about the project, including ‘risks and hazards’. Unlike the ‘one-message’ slide culture Stein (2020, this issue) describes among German management consultants whose aim it was to convince their clients to invest, slides of Timor Gap employees were highly complex, densely written, and contained many foreign loan words; some were entirely in English, a language that only few people understand along the south coast. The complex slides may have been aimed at impressing the audience so that they would accept the project.…”

“…Examining various instantiations of wilful blindness in the history, planning and implementation of the Tasi Mane project in Timor-Leste, this article suggests that in most cases, doubts or concerns were ignored for rather ‘banal’ reasons, not because they were part of an ill-intentioned master-plan. Ignorance emerges not just as ‘strategy’ (see also Stein, 2020, this issue) but also as a form of ‘praxis’ (Anand, 2015: 309). Here I follow Hannah Arendt’s (1994 [1963]) use of the term ‘banal’, describing ordinary and routine actions that are not reflected on even when they can have serious (even horrific) consequences.…”